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ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 



ADVENTURES 
IN THE ARTS 



INFORMAL 
CHAPTERS 
ON PAINTERS 
VAUDEVILLE 
AND POETS 



BY 

MARSDEN HARTLEY 



BONI AND LIVERIGHT 

Publishers New York 



A^ 






,4 



I 

V 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 



Copyright, 1921, By 

BONI & LlVERIGHT, InC. 



Printed in the United States of America 

ilLp 30 1921 



0)CIA624603 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The papers in this book are not intended in any 
way to be professional treatises. They must be 
viewed in the light of entertaining conversations. 
Their possible value lies in their directness of im- 
pulse, and not in weight of argument. I could not 
wish to go into the qualities of art more deeply. 
A reaction, to be pleasant, must be simple. This 
is the apology I have to offer: Reactions, then, 
through direct impulse, and not essays by means of 

stiffened analysis. 

Marsden Hartley. 



Some of the papers included in 
this book have appeared in Art and 
Archeology, The Seven Arts, The 
Dial, The Nation, The New Re- 
public, and The Touchstone. Thanks 
are due to the editors of these 
periodicals for permission to re- 
print. 



TO 

ALFRED STIEGLITZ 



INTRODUCTION 

TO 

ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Perhaps the most important part of Criticism 
is the fact that it presents to the creator a prob- 
lem which is never solved. Criticism is to him a 
perpetual Presence : or perhaps a ghost which he 
will not succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his 
mind that Criticism was a certain thing: a good 
thing or a bad, a proper presence or an irrelevant, 
he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can 
not. For Criticism is a configuration of responses 
and reactions so intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it 
would be as simple to category Life itself. 

The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as 
he rejects the simplifying and reducing process of 
the average man who at an early age puts Life 
away into some snug conception of his mind and 
race. This one turns the key. He has released 
his will and love from the vast Ceremonial of won- 
der, from the deep Poem of Being, into some par- 
ticular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve 
comfort or at least shun pain. Not so, the artist. 
In the moment when he elects to avoid by whatever 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be fit 
to create. He must face experience forever 
freshly: reduce life each day anew to chaos and 
remould it into order. He must be always a willing 
virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus 
only may he retain and record that pure surprise 
whose earliest voicing is the first cry of the infant. 

The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward 
Life should be his way toward Criticism also. He 
should hold it as part of his Adventure. He should 
understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, 
stupid and cruel, the ponderable weight of Life 
itself, reacting upon his search for a fresh conquest 
over it. Though it persist unchanged in its role of 
purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Pub- 
lic, he should know it for himself a blessed dis- 
pensation. 

With his maturity, the creator's work goes out 
into the world. And in this act, he puts the world 
away. For the artist's work defines: and definition 
means apartness: and the average man is undefined 
in the social body. Here is a danger for the artist 
within the very essence of his artistic virtue. Dur- 
ing the years of his apprenticeship, he has struggled 
to create for himself an essential world out of ex- 
perience. Now he begins to succeed: and he lives 
too fully in his own selection: he lives too simply in 
the effects of his effort. The gross and fumbling 
impact of experience is eased. The grind of ordi- 
nary intercourse is dimmed. The rawness of Fam- 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

ily and Business is refined or removed. But now 
once more the world comes in to him, in the form 
of the Critic. Here again, in a sharp concentrated 
sense, the world moves on him: its' complacency, 
its hysteria, its down-tending appetites and fond il- 
lusions. Its pathetic worship of yesterdays and 
hatred of tomorrows. Its fear-dogmas and its blood- 
avowals. 

The artist shall leave the world only to find it, 
hate it only because he loves, attack it only if he 
serves. At that epoch of his life when the world's 
gross sources may grow dim. Criticism brings them 
back. Wherefore, the function of the Critic is a 
blessing and a need. 

The creator's reception of this newly direct, in- 
tense, mundane intrusion is not always passive. If 
the artist is an intelligent man, he may respond to 
the intervening world on its own plane. He may 
turn critic himself. 

When the creator turns critic, we are in the pres- 
ence of a consummation : we have a complete experi- 
ence: we have a sort of sacrament. For to the in- 
trusion of the world he interposes his own body. In 
his art, the creator's body would be Itself intrusion. 
The artist is too humble and too sane to break the 
ecstatic flow of vision with his personal form. The 
true artist despises the personal as an end. He 
makes fluid, and distils hi? personal form. He 
channels it beyond himself to a Unity which of 
course contains It. But Criticism is nothing which 

xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

is not the sheer projection of a body. The artist 
turns Self into a universal P'orm : but the critic re- 
duces Form to Self. Criticism is to the artist the 
intrusion, in a form irreducible to art, of the body 
of the world. What can he do but interpose his 
own? 

This is the value of the creator's criticism. He 
gives to the world himself. And his self is a rich 
life. 

It includes for instance a direct experience of art, 
the which no professional critic may possess. And 
it includes as well a direct knowledge of life, sharp- 
ened in the retrospect of that devotion to the living 
which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the 
critic after all, but an "artistic" individual somehow 
impeded from satisfying his esthetic emotion and 
his need of esthetic form in the gross and stubborn 
stuff of life itself: who therefore, since he is too 
intelligent for substitutes, resorts to the already 
digested matter of the hardier creators, takes their 
assimilated food and does with it what the athletic 
artist does with the meat and lymph and bone of 
God himself? The artist mines from the earth and 
smelts with his own fire. He is higher brother to 
the toilers of the soil. The critic takes the prod- 
ucts of the creator, reforges, twists them, always in 
the cold. For if he had the fire to melt, he would 
not stay with metals already worked: when the 
earth's womb bursts with richer. 

When the creator turns critic, we are certain of 
xiv 



INTRODUCTION 

a feast. We have a fare that needs no metaphysi- 
cal sauce (such as must transform the product of 
the Critic). Here is good food. Go to it and 
eat. The asides of a Baudelaire, a Goethe, a Da 
Vinci outweight a thousand tomes of the profes- 
sional critics. 



I know of no American book like this one by 
Marsden Hartley. I do not believe American 
painting heretofore capable of so vital a response 
and of so athletic an appraisal. Albert Ryder bar- 
ricaded himself from the world's intrusion. The 
American world was not intelligent enough in his 
days to touch him to an activer response. And 
Ryder, partaking of its feebleness, from his devo- 
tion to the pure subjective note became too ex- 
hausted for aught else. As a world we have ad- 
vanced. We have a fully functioning Criticism . . . 
swarms and schools of makers of the sonorous com- 
placencies of Judgment. We have an integral body 
of creative-minded men and women interposing it- 
self with valiance upon the antithesis of the social 
resistance to social growth. Hartley is in some 
ways a continuance of Ryder. One stage is Ryder, 
the solitary who remained one. A second stage is 
Hartley, the solitary who stands against the more 
aggressive, more interested Marketplace. 

You will find in this book the artist of a cultural 
epoch. This man has mastered the plastic mes- 

XV 



INTRODUCTION 

sages of modern Europe: he has gone deep in the 
classic forms of the ancient Indian Dance. But he 
is, still, not very far from Ryder. He is always 
the child — whatever wise old worlds he contemplates 
— the child, wistful, poignant, trammeled, of New 
England. 

Hartley has adventured not alone deep but wide. 
He steps from New Mexico to Berlin, from the 
salons of the Paris of Marie Laurencin to the dust 
and tang of the American Circus. He is eclectic. 
But wherever he goes he chronicles not so much 
these actual worlds as his own pleasure of them. 
They are but mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, 
for his own delicate, incisive humor. For Hartley 
is an innocent and a Jiaif. At times he is profound. 
Always he is profoundly simple. 

Tragedy and Comedy are adult. The child's 
world is Tragicomic. So Marsden Hartley's. He 
is not deep enough — like most of our Moderns — 
in the pregnant chaos to be submerged in blackness 
by the hot struggle of the creative will. He may 
weep, but he can smile next moment at a pretty 
song. He may be hurt, but he gets up to dance. 

In this book — the autobiography of a creator — 
Marsden Hartley peers variously into the modern 
world: but it is in search of Fairies. 

Waldo Frank. 
Lisbon, June, 1921. 



XVI 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction by Waldo Frank ... xi 

Foreword 

Concerning Fairy Tales and Me . . 3 



Part One 



9 

10 
II 
12 
13 
14 
15 



The Red Man 13 

Whitman and Cezanne 30 

Ryder 37 

WiNSLOw Homer ........ 42 

American Values in Painting ... 50 

Modern Art in America 59 

Our Imaginatives 65 

Our Impressionists 74 

Arthur B. Davies 80 

Rex Slinkard 87 

Some American Water-Colorists ... 96 

The Appeal of Photography .... 102 

Some Women Artists 112 

Revaluations in Impressionism . . . 120 

Odilon Redon 126 

xvii 



CONTENTS 



rxcE 



i6. The Virtues of Amateur Painting . . 134 

17. Henri Rousseau 144 

Part Two 

18. The Twilight of the Acrobat . . . 155 

19. Vaudeville 162 

20. A Charming Equestrienne .... 175 

21. John Barrymore in Peter Ibbetson . . 182 

Part Three 

22. La Closerie de Lilas 191 

23. Emily Dickinson 198 

24. Adelaide Crapsey 207 

25. Francis Thompson 215 

26. Ernest Dowson 221 

27. Henry James on Rupert Brooke . . . 228 

28. The Dearth of Critics 238 

Afterword 

The Importance of Being "Dada" . . 247 



xvin 



FOREWORD 



CONCERNING FAIRY TALES 
AND ME 

Sometimes I think myself one of the unique chil- 
dren among children. I never read a fairy story 
in my childhood. I always had the feeling as a 
child, that fairy stories were for grown-ups and 
were best understood by them, and for that rea- 
son I think, it must have been that I postponed them. 
I found them, even at sixteen, too involved and mys- 
tifying to take them in with quite the simple gulli- 
bility that is necessary. But that was because I was 
left alone with the incredibly magical reality from 
morning until nightfall, and the nights meant noth- 
ing more remarkable to me than the days did, no 
more than they do now. I find moonlight merely 
another species of illumination by which one reg- 
isters continuity of sensation. My nursery was al- 
ways on the edge of the strangers' knee, wondering 

who they were, what they might even mean to those 
who were as is called "nearest" them. 

I had a childhood vast with terror and surprise. 
If it is true that one forgets what one wishes to 
forget, then I have reason for not remembering the 
major part of those days and hours that are sup- 
posed to introduce one graciously into the world and 

3 



CONCERNING FAIRY TALES 

offer one a clue to the experience that is sure to fol- 
low. Not that my childhood was so bitter, unless 
for childhood loneliness is bitterness, and without 
doubt it is the worst thing that can happen to one's 
childhood. Mine was merely a different childhood, 
and in this sense an original one. I was left with 
myself to discover myself amid the multitudinous 
other and far greater mysteries. I was never the 
victim of fear of goblins and ghosts because I was 
never taught them. I was merely taught by nature 
to follow, as if led by a rare and tender hand, the 
then almost unendurable beauty that lay on every 
side of me. It was pain then, to follow beauty, 
because I didn't understand beauty; it must always, 
I think, be distressing to follow anything one does 
not understand, 

I used to go, in my earliest school days, into a lit- 
tle strip of woodland not far from the great omi- 
nous red brick building in a small manufacturing 
town, on the edge of a wonderful great river in 
Maine, from which cool and quiet spot I could 
always hear the dominant clang of the bell, and 
there I could listen with all my very boyish sim- 
plicity to the running of the water over the stones, 
and watch — for it was spring, of course — the new 
leaves pushing up out of the mould, and see the 
light-hued blossoms swinging on the new breeze. I 
cared more for these in themselves than I did for 
any legendary presences sitting under them, shak- 
ing imperceptible fingers and waving invisible wands 

4 



AND ME 

with regality in a world made only for them and 
for children who were taught mechanically to see 
them there. 

I was constantly confronted with the magic of 
reality itself, wondering why one thing was built 
of exquisite curves and another of harmonic angles. 
It was not a scientific passion in me, it was merely 
my sensing of the world of visible beauty around 
me, pressing in on me with the vehemence of splen- 
dor, on every side. 

I feel about the world now precisely as I did 
then, despite all the reasons that exist to encourage 
the change of attitude. I care for the magic of ex- 
perience still, the magic that exists even in facts, 
though little or nothing for the objective material 
value. 

Life as an Idea engrosses me with the same ar- 
dor as in the earlier boyish days, with the difference 
that there Is much to admire and so much less to 
reverence and be afraid of. I harp always on the 
"idea" of life as I dwell perpetually on the exist- 
ence of the moment. 

I might say, then, that my childhood was com- 
parable. In Its simplicity and extravagance of won- 
der, to the youth of Odilon Redon, that remarkable 
painter of the fantasy of existence, of which he 
speaks so delicately in letters to friends. His youth 
was apparently much like mine, not a youth of ath- 
leticism so much as a preoccupancy with wonder and 
the Imminence of beauty surrounding all things. 

5 



CONCERNING FAIRY TALES 

I was preoccupied with the "being" of things. 
Things in themselves engrossed me more than the 
problem of experience. I was satisfied with the 
effect of things upon my senses, and cared nothing 
for their deeper values. The inherent magic in the 
appearance of the world about me, engrossed and 
amazed me. No cloud or blossom or bird or hu- 
man ever escaped me, I think. 

I was not indifferent to anything that took shape 
before me, though when it came to people I was 
less credulous of their perfection because they 
pressed forward their not always certain credentials 
upon me. I reverenced them then too much for 
an imagined austerity as I admire them now perhaps 
not enough for their charm, for it is the charm of 
things and people only that engages and satisfies 
me. I have completed my philosophical equations, 
and have become enamored of people as having the 
same propensities as all other objects of nature. 
One need never question appearances. One accepts 
them for their face value, as the camera accepts 
them, without recommendation or specialized quali- 
fication. They are what they become to one. The 
capacity for legend comes out of the capacity for 
experience, and it is in this fashion that I hold such 
high respect for geniuses like Grimm and Andersen, 
but as I know their qualities I find myself leaning 
with more readiness toward Lewis Carroll's superb 
"Alice in Wonderland." 

I was, I suppose, born backward, physically 

6 



AND ME 

speaking. I was confronted with the vastltude of 
the univejse at once, without the Ingratiating Intro- 
duction of the fairy tale. I had early made the 
not so Inane decision that I would not read a book 
until I really wanted to. One of the rarest women 
In the world, having listened to my remark, said 
she had a book she knew I would like because it 
was so different, and forthwith presented me with 
Emerson's Essays, the first book that I have any 
knowledge of reading, and it was in my eighteenth 
year. Until then I had been wholly absorbed with 
the terrors and the majestlcal Inferences of the mo- 
ment, the hour, and the day. I was alone with them, 
and they were wonderful and excessively baffling in 
their splendors; then, after filling my mind and soul 
with the legendary splendors of Friendship, and 
The Oversoul-Circles, and Compensation, each of 
these words of exciting largeness in themselves, I 
turned to the dramatic unrealities of Zarathustra, 
which, of course, was in no way to be believed be- 
cause It did not exist. And then came expansion 
and release into the outer world again through in- 
terpretation of Plato, and of Leaves of Grass itself. 

I have saved myself from the disaster of beliefs 
through these magical books, and am free once 
more as in my early childhood to indulge myself 
in the iridescent idea of life, as Idea, 

But the fairy story is nothing after all but a 
means whereby we, as children, may arrive at some 
clue as to the significance of things around us, and 

7 



CONCERNING FAIRY TALES 

it is through them the child finds his way out from 
incoherency toward comprehension. The universe 
is a vast place, as we all know who think we com- 
prehend it in admiring it. The things we cannot 
know are in reality of no consequence, in comparison 
with the few we can know. I can know, for in- 
stance, that my morning is the new era of my exist- 
ence, and that I shall never live through another like 
it, as I have never lived through the one I recall in 
my memory, which was Yesterday. Yesterday was 
my event in experience then, as it is my event in 
memory now. I am related to the world by the way 
I feel attached to the life of it as exemplified in the 
vividness of the moment. I am, by reason of my 
peculiar personal experience, enabled to extract the 
magic from the moment, discarding the material 
husk of it precisely as the squirrel does the shell of 
the nut. 

I am preoccupied with the business of transmuta- 
tion — which is to say, the proper evaluation of life 
as idea, of experience as delectable diversion. It 
is necesary for everyone to poetize his sensations in 
order to comprehend them. Weakness in the di- 
rection of philosophy creates the quality of dogmatic 
interrogation. A preoccupancy with religious char- 
acteristics assists those who are interested in the 
problem of sublimation. The romanticist is a kind 
of scientific person engaged in the correct assem- 
bling of chemical constituents that will produce a 
formula by which he can live out every one of his 

8 



AND ME 

moments with a perfect comprehension of their 
charm and of their everlasting value to him. If 
the romanticist have the advantage of comprehen- 
sion of the sense of beauty as related to art, then 
he may be said to be wholly equipped for the ex- 
quisite legend of life in which he takes his place, 
as factor in the perfected memory of existence, which 
becomes the real history of life, as an idea. The 
person of most power in life is he who becomes 
high magician with the engaging and elusive trick. 

It is a fairy-tale in itself if you will, and everyone 
is entitled to his or her own private splendor, which, 
of course, must be invented from intelligence for 
oneself. 

There will be no magic found away from life. It 
is what you do with the street-corner in your brain 
that shall determine your gift. It will not be found 
in the wilderness, and in one's toying with the magic 
of existence is the one gift for the management of 
experience. 

I hope one day, when life as an "idea" permits, 
and that I have figured will be somewhere around 
my ninetieth year, to take up books that absorb the 
brains of the intelligent. When I read a book, it 
is because it will somehow expose to me the magic 
of existence. My fairy tales of late have been 
"Wuthering Heights," and the work of the Brothers 
James, Will and Henry. I am not so sure but 
that I like William best, and I assure you that is 

9 



CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME 

saying a great deal, but it is only because I think 
William is more like life as idea. 

I shall hope when it comes time to sit in a garden 
and fold one's hands gently, listening to the birds 
all over again, watching the blossoms swinging with 
a still acuter eye, to take up the books of Grimm 
and Andersen, for I have a feeling they will be the 
books that will best corroborate my comprehension 
of life as an idea. I think it will be the best time 
to read them then, to go out with a memory soft- 
ened by the warm hues and touches of legend that 
rise out of the air surrounding life itself. 

There will be a richer comprehension of "once 
upon a time there was a princess" — who wore a 
great many jewelled rings on her fingers and whose 
eyes were like deep pools in the farthest fields of 
the sky — for that will be the lady who let me love 
in the ways I was made to forget; the lady whose 
hands I have touched as gently as possible and from 
whom I have exacted no wish save that I might 
always love someone or something that was so like 
herself as to make me think it was no other than 
herself. It is because I love the idea of life better 
than anything else that I believe most of all in the 
magic of existence, and in spite of much terrifying 
and disillusioning experience of late, I believe. 



lO 



PART ONE 



THE RED MAN 

It is significant that all races, and primitive peo- 
ples especially, exhibit the wish somehow to inscribe 
their racial autograph before they depart. It is our 
redman who permits us to witness the signing of his 
autograph with the beautiful gesture of his body in 
the form of the symbolic dance which he and his 
forefathers have practiced through the centuries, 
making the name America something to be remem- 
bered among the great names of the world and of 
time. It is the redman who has written down our 
earliest known history, and it is of his symbolic and 
esthetic endeavors that we should be most reason- 
ably proud. He is the one man who has shown us 
the significance of the poetic aspects of our original 
land. Without him we should still be unrepresented 
in the cultural development of the world. The wide 
discrepancies between our earliest history and our 
present make it an imperative issue for everyone 
loving the name America to cherish him while he 
remains among us as the only esthetic representative 
of our great country up to the present hour. He has 
indicated for all time the symbolic splendor of our 
plains, canyons, mountains, lakes, mesas and ravines, 
our forests and our native skies, with their animal 

13 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

inhabitants, the buffalo, the deer, the eagle and the 
various other living presences in their midst. He 
has learned throughout the centuries the nature of 
our soil and has symbolized for his own religious 
and esthetic satisfaction all the various forms that 
have become benefactors to him. 

Americans of this time and of time to come shall 
know little or nothing of their spacious land until 
they have sought some degree of intimacy with our 
first artistic relative. The redman is the one truly 
indigenous religionist and esthete of America. He 
knows every form of animal and vegetable life ad- 
hering to our earth, and has made for himself a 
series of striking pageantries in the form of stirring 
dances to celebrate them, and his relation to them. 
Throughout the various dances of the Pueblos of the 
Rio Grande those of San Felipe, Santo Domingo, 
San Ildefonso, Taos, Tesuque, and all the other 
tribes of the west and the southwest, the same uni- 
fied sense of beauty prevails, and in some of the 
dances to a most remarkable degree. For instance, 
in a large pueblo like Santo Domingo, you have the 
dance composed of nearly three hundred people, 
two hundred of whom form the dance contingent, the 
other third a chorus, probably the largest singing 
chorus in the entire redman population of America. 
In a small pueblo like Tesuque, the theme is beauti- 
fully represented by from three to a dozen indi- 
viduals, all of them excellent performers in various 
ways. The same quality and the same character, 

14 



THE RED MAN 

the same sense of beauty, prevails In all of them. 
It is the little pueblo of Tesuque which has just 
finished its series of Christmas dances — a four-day 
festival celebrating with all but impeccable mastery 
the various identities which have meant so much to 
them both physically and spiritually — that I would 
here cite as an example. It is well known that once 
gesture is organized, it requires but a handful of 
people to represent multitude; and this lonely hand- 
ful of redmen in the pueblo of Tesuque, numbering 
at most but seventy-five or eighty individuals, less- 
ened, as is the case with all the pueblos of the coun- 
try to a tragical degree by the recent invasions of 
the influenza epidemic, showed the interested ob- 
server, in groups of five or a dozen dancers and 
soloists including drummers, through the incompar- 
able pageantry of the buffalo, the eagle, the snow- 
bird, and other varying types of small dances, the 
mastery of the redman in the art of gesture, the 
art of symbolized pantomimic expression. It is 
the buffalo, the eagle, and the deer dances that 
show you their essential greatness as artists. You 
find a species of rhythm so perfected in its relation 
to racial interpretation as hardly to admit of wit- 
nessing ever again the copied varieties of dancing 
such as we whites of the present hour are familiar 
with. It is nothing short of captivating artistry of 
first excellence, and we are familiar with nothing 
that equals it outside the Negro syncopation which 

15 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

we now know so well, and from which we have bor- 
rowed all we have of native expression. 

If we had the redman sense of time in our system, 
we would be better able to express ourselves. We 
are notoriously unorganized in esthetic conception, 
and what we appreciate most is merely the athletic 
phase of bodily expression, which is of course at- 
tractive enough, but is not in itself a formal mode 
of expression. The redman would teach us to be 
ourselves in a still greater degree, as his forefathers 
have taught him to be himself down the centuries, 
despite every obstacle. It is now as the last obstacle 
in the way of his racial expression that we as his 
host and guardian are pleasing ourselves to figure. 
It is as inhospitable host we are quietly urging de- 
nunciation of his pagan ceremonials. It is an inhos- 
pitable host that we are, and it is amazing enough, 
our wanting to suppress him. You will travel over 
many continents to find a more beautifully synthe- 
sized artistry than our redman oflfers. In times of 
peace we go about the world seeking out every 
species of life foreign to ourselves for our own 
esthetic or intellectual diversion, and yet we neglect 
on our very doorstep the perhaps most remarkable 
realization of beauty that can be found anywhere. 
It is of a perfect piece with the great artistry of 
all time. We have to go for what we know of 
these types of expression to books and to fragments 
of stone, to monuments and to the preserved bits of 
pottery we now may see under glass mostly, while 

i6 



THE RED MAN 

there Is the living remnant of a culture so fine in 
its appreciation of the beauty of things, under our 
own home eye, so near that we can not even see it. 
A glimpse of the buffalo dance alone will furnish 
proof sufficient to you of the sense of symbolic sig- 
nificances in the redman that is unsurpassed. The 
redman is a genius in his gift of masquerade alone. 
He is a genius in detail, and in ensemble, and the 
producer of today might learn far more from him 
than he can be aware of except by visiting his unique 
performances. The redman's notion of the theatric 
does not depend upon artificial appliances. He re- 
lies entirely upon the sun with its so clear light of 
the west and southwest to do his profiling and sil- 
houetting for him, and he knows the sun will co- 
operate with every one of his intentions. He allows 
for the sense of mass and of detail with proper pro- 
portion, allows also for the interval of escape in 
mood, crediting the value of the pause with the abil- 
ity to do its prescribed work for the eye and ear 
perfectly, and when he is finished he retires from 
the scene carefully to the beating of the drums, leav- 
ing the emotion to round itself out gradually until 
he disappears, and silence completes the picture for 
the eye and the brain. His staging is of the sim- 
plest, and therefore, the most natural. Since he is 
sure of his rhythms, in every other dancer as well 
as himself, he is certain of his ensemble, and is like- 
wise sure there will be no dead spots either in the 
scenario or in the presentation. His production is 

17 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

not a show for the amusement of the onlooker; it 
is a pageant for the edification of his own soul. 
Each man is therefore concerned with the staging of 
the idea, because it is his own spiritual drama in a 
state of enaction, and each is in his own way man- 
ager of the scene, and of the duos, trios, and en- 
sembles, or whatever form the dances may require. 
It is therefore of a piece with his conception of 
nature and the struggle for realism is not necessary, 
since he is at all times the natural actor, the natural 
expresser of the indications and suggestions derived 
from the great theme of nature which occupies his 
mind, and body, and soul. His acting is invented 
by himself for purposes of his own, and it is nature 
that gives him the sign and symbol for the expres- 
sion of life as a synthesis. He is a genius in plastic 
expression, and every movement of his is sure to 
register in the unity of the theme, because he him- 
self is a powerful unit of the group in which he may 
be performing. He is esthetically a responsible fac- 
tor, since it concerns him as part of the great idea. 
He is leading soloist and auxiliary in one. He is 
the significant instrument in the orchestration of the 
theme at hand, and knows his body will respond to 
every requirement of phrasing. You will find the 
infants, of two and three years of age even, respond- 
ing in terms of play to the exacting rhythms of the 
dance, just as with orientals it was the children often 
who wove the loveliest patterns in their rugs. 

In the instance of the buffalo dance of the Tesuque 

i8 



THE RED MAN 

Indians, contrary to what might be expected or 
would popularly be conceived, there is not riotry 
of color, but the costumes are toned rather in the 
sombre hues of the animal in question, and after 
the tone of the dark flanks of the mountains crested 
and avalanched with snows, looking more like buf- 
faloes buried knee deep in white drifts than any- 
thing else one may think of. They bring you the 
sense of the power of the buffalo personality, the 
formidable beast that once stampeded the prairies 
around them, solemnized with austere gesturing, en- 
veloping him with stateliness, and the silence of the 
winter that surrounds themselves. Three men, two 
af them impersonating the buffalo, the third with 
bow and arrow in hand, doubtless the hunter, and 
two women representing the mother buffalo, furnish 
the ensemble. Aside from an occasional note of 
red in girdles and minor trappings, with a soften- 
ing touch of green in the pine branches in their hands, 
the adjustment of hue is essentially one of the black 
and white, one of the most difficult harmonies in 
esthetic scales the painter encounters in the making 
of a picture, the most difficult of all probably, by 
reason of its limited range and the economic sever- 
ity of color. It calls for nothing short of the fin- 
est perception of nuance, and it is the redman of 
America who knows with an almost flawless eye the 
natural harmonies of the life that surrounds him. 
He has for so long decorated his body with the hues 
of the earth that he has grown to be a part of them. 

19 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

He is a living embodiment in color of various tonal 
characteristics of the landscape around him. He 
knows the harmonic value of a bark or a hide, or 
a bit of broken earth, and of the natural unpolluted 
coloring to be drawn out of various types of vege- 
table matter at his disposal. Even if he resorts to 
our present-day store ribbons and cheap trinkets for 
accessories, he does it with a view to creating the 
appearance of racial ensemble. He is one of the 
essential decorators of the world. A look at the 
totem poles and the prayer robes of the Indians of 
Alaska will convince you of that. 

In the buffalo dance, then, you perceive the red- 
man's fine knowledge of color relations, of the har- 
monizing of buffalo skins, of white buckskins painted 
with most expressively simple designs symbolizing 
the various earth identities, and the accompanying 
ornamentation of strings of shells and other odd bits 
having a black or a grey and white lustre. You get 
an adjusted relation of white which traverses the 
complete scale of color possibility in monochrome. 
The two men representing the buffalo, with buf- 
falo heads covering their heads and faces from view, 
down to their breasts, their bodies to the waist 
painted black, no sign of pencillings visible to relieve 
the austerity of intention, legs painted black and 
white, with cuffs of skunk's fur round the ankles to 
represent the death mask symbol, relieving the edges 
of the buckskin moccasins — in all this you have the 
notes that are necessary for the color balance of the 

20 



THE RED MAN 

idea of solemnity presented to the eye. You find 
even the white starlike splashes here and there on 
backs, breasts and arms coinciding splendidly with 
the flecks of eagles-down that quiver in the wind 
down their black bodies, and the long black hair of 
the accompanying hunter, as flecks of foam would 
rise from waterfalls of dark mountain streams; and 
the feathers that float from the tips of the buffalo 
horns seem like young eaglets ready to leave the 
eyry, to swim for the first time the far fields of air 
above and below them, to traverse with skill the 
sunlit spaces their eyes have opened to with a fierce 
amazement. Even the clouds of frozen breath 
darting from the lips of the dancers served as an 
essential phase of the symbolic decoration, and the 
girdles of tiny conchlike shells rattling round their 
agile thighs made a music you were glad to hear. 
The sunshine fell from them, too, in scales of light, 
danced around the spaces enveloping them along 
with the flecks of eagle-down that floated away from 
their bodies with the vigors of the dance, floating 
away from their dark warm bodies, and their jet- 
blue hair. It is the incomparable understanding of 
their own inventive rhythms that inspire and im- 
press you as spectator. It is the swift comprehen- 
sion of change in rhythm given them by the drum- 
mers, the speedy response of their so living pulsat- 
ing bodies, the irresistible rapport with the varying 
themes, that thrills and invites you to remain close 
to the picture. They know, as perfect artists would 

21 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

know, the essential value of the materials at their 
disposal, and the eye for harmonic relationships is 
as keen as the impeccable gift for rhythm which is 
theirs. The note of skill was again accentuated 
when, at the close of the season's ensemble with a 
repetition of the beautiful eagle dance, there ap- 
peared two grotesqueries in the form of charming 
devil spirits in the hues of animals also, again in 
startling arrangements of black and white, with the 
single hint of color in the red lips of the masks that 
covered their heads completely from view, and from 
which long tails of white horsehair fell down cheir 
grey white backs — completing the feeling once again 
of stout animal spirits roaming through dark for- 
ests in search of sad faces, or, it may even be, of 
evil doers. 

All these dances form the single spectacle surviv- 
ing from a great race that no American can afford 
actually to miss, and certainly not to ignore. It is 
easy to conceive w^ith what furore of amazement 
these spectacles would be received if they were 
brought for a single performance to our metropoli- 
tan stage. But they will never be seen away from 
the soil on which they have been conceived and 
perpetuated. It is with a simple cordiality the red- 
man permits you to witness the esthetic survivals 
of his great race. It is the artist and the poet for 
whom they seem to be almost especially created, 
since these are probably nearest to understanding 
them from the point of view of finely organized 

22 



THE RED MAN 

expression; for it is by the artist and the poet of 
the first order that they have been invented and 
perfected. We as Americans of today would profit 
by assisting as much as possible in the continuance 
of these beautiful spectacles, rather than to assist 
in the calm dismissal and destruction of them. It 
is the gesture of a slowly but surely passing race 
which they themselves can not live without; just 
as we, if we but knew the ineffable beauty of them, 
would want at least to avail ourselves of a feast 
for the eye which no other country in existence can 
offer us, and which any other nation in the world 
would be only too proud to cherish and foster. 

We are not, I think, more than vaguely conscious 
of what we possess in these redman festivities, by 
way of esthetic prize. It is with pain that one hears 
rumors of official disapproval of these rare and in- 
valuable ceremonials. Those familiar with human 
psychology understand perfectly that the one nec- 
essary element for individual growth is freedom 
to act according to personal needs. Once an oppo- 
sition of any sort is interposed, you get a blocked 
aspect of evolution, you get a withered branch, and 
it may even be a dead root. All sorts of com- 
plexes and complexities occur. You get deformity, 
if not complete helplessness and annihilation. I can 
not imagine what would happen to the redman if 
his one racial gesture were denied him, if he were 
forbidden to perform his symbolic dances from sea- 
son to season. It is a survival that is as spiritually 

23 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

imperative to him as it is physically and emotion- 
ally necessary. I can see a whole flood of exquisite 
inhibitions heaped up for burial and dry rot within 
the caverns and the interstices of his soul. He is 
a rapidly disappearing splendor, despite the possible 
encouragement of statistics. He needs the dance 
to make his body live out its natural existence, pre- 
cisely as he needs the air for his lungs and blood 
for his veins. He needs to dance as we need to 
laugh to save ourselves from fixed stages of mor- 
bidity and disintegration. It is the laughter of his 
body that he insists upon, as well as depends upon. 
A redman deprived of his racial gesture is unthink- 
able. You would have him soon the bleached car- 
cass in the desert out of which death moans, and 
from which the li/.ard crawls. It would be in the 
nature of direct race suicide. He needs protection 
therefore rather than disapproval. It is as if you 
clipped the wing of the eagle, and then asked him 
to soar to the sun, to cut a curve on the sky with the 
instrument dislodged; or as if you asked the deer to 
roam the wood with its cloven hoofs removed. 
You can not cut the main artery of the body and 
expect it to continue functioning. Depriving the 
redman of his one enviable gesture would be cutting 
the artery of racial instinct, emptying the beautiful 
chamber of his soul of its enduring consciousness. 
The window would be opened and the bird flown to 
a dead sky. It is simply unthinkable. The redman 
is essentially a thankful and a religious being. He 

24 



THE RED MAN 

needs to celebrate the gifts his heaven pours upon 
him. Without them he would in short perish, and 
perish rapidly, having no breath to breathe, and no 
further need for survival. He is already in proc- 
ess of disappearance from our midst, with the at- 
tempts toward assimilation. 

Inasmuch as we have the evidence of a fine aris- 
tocracy among us still, it would seem as if it be- 
hooved us as a respectable host to let the redman 
guest entertain himself as he will, as he sublimely 
does, since as guardians of such exceptional charges 
we can not seem to entertain them. There is no 
logical reason why they should accept an inferior 
hospitality, other than with the idea of not inflicting 
themselves upon a strange host more than is neces- 
sary. The redman in the aggregate Is an exam- 
ple of the peaceable and unobtrusive citizen; we 
would not presume to interfere with the play of chil- 
dren in the sunlight. They are among the beau- 
tiful children of the world in their harmlessness. 
They are among the aristocracy of the world in the 
matters of ethics, morals, and etiquette. We for- 
get they are vastly older, and in symbolic ways in- 
finitely more experienced than ourselves. They do 
not share in tailor-made customs. They do not need 
imposed culture, which is essentially inferior to their 
own. Soon we shall see them written on tablets of 
stone, along with the Egyptians and the others 
among the races that have perished. The esthetics 
of the redman have been too particular to permit 

25 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

of universal understanding, and of universal adapta- 
tion. It is the same with all primitives, who in- 
vent regimes and modes of expression for them- 
selves according to their own specific psychological 
needs. We encourage every other sign and indi- 
cation of beauty toward the progress of perfection. 
Why should not we encourage a race that is beau- 
tiful by the proof of centuries to remain the unof- 
fensive guest of the sun and the moon and the stars 
while they may? As the infant prodigy among 
races, there is much that we could inherit from these 
people if we could prove ourselves more worthy and 
less egotistic. 

The artist and the poet of perception come for- 
ward with heartiest approval and it is the supplica- 
tion of the poet and the artist which the redman 
needs most of all. Science looks upon him as a 
phenomenon; esthetics looks upon him as a giant of 
masterful expression in our midst. The redman is 
poet and artist of the very first order among the 
geniuses of time. We have nothing more native at 
our disposal than the beautiful creations of this 
people. It is singular enough that the as yet remote 
black man contributes the only native representation 
of rhythm and melody we possess. As an intelligent 
race, we are not even sure we want to welcome him 
as completely as we might, if his color were just 
a shade warmer, a shade nearer our own. We have 
no qualms about yellow and white and the oriental 
intermediate hues. W"e may therefore accept the 

26 



THE RED MAN 

redman without any of the prejudices peculiar to 
other types of skin, and we may accept his contri- 
bution to our culture as a most significant and im- 
portant one. We haven't even begun to make use 
of the beautiful hints in music alone which he has 
given to us. We need, and abjectly so I may say, 
an esthetic concept of our own. Other nations of 
the world have long since accepted Congo original- 
ity. The world has yet to learn of the originality 
of the redman, and we who have him as our guest, 
knowing little or nothing of his powers and the 
beauty he confers on us by his remarkable esthetic 
propensities, should be the first to welcome and to 
foster him. It is not enough to admit of archaeo- 
logical curiosity. We need to admit, and speedily, 
the rare and excellent esthetics in our midst, a part 
of our own intimate scene. The redman is a spir- 
itual expresser of very vital issues. If his pottery 
and his blankets offer the majority but little, his 
ceremonials do contribute to the comparative few 
who can perceive a spectacle we shall not see the 
equal of in history again. It would help at least 
a little toward proving to the world around us that 
we are not so young a country as we might seem, 
nor yet as diffident as our national attitude would 
seem to indicate. The smile alone of the redman 
is the light of our rivers, plains, canyons, and moun- 
tains. He has the calm of all our native earth. It 
is from the earth all things arise. It is our geog- 
raphy that makes us Americans of the present, chil- 

27 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

dren. We are the product of a day. The redman 
is the product of withered ages. He has written 
and is still writing a very impressive autograph on 
the waste places of history. It would seem to me 
to be a sign of modernism in us to preserve the liv- 
ing esthetic splendors in our midst. Every other 
nation has preserved its inheritances. We need 
likewise to do the same. It is not enough to put 
the redman as a specimen under glass along with the 
auk and the dinosaur. He is still alive and longing 
to live. We have lost the buffalo and the beaver 
and we are losing the redman, also, and all these 
are fine symbols of our own native richness and aus- 
terity. The redman will perpetuate himself only 
by the survival of his own customs for he will never 
be able to accept customs that are as foreign to him 
as ours are and must always be; he will never be 
able to accept a culture which is inferior to his own. 
In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the red- 
man as a gift. As Americans we should accept the 
one American genius we possess, with genuine alac- 
rity. We have upon our own soil something to 
show the world as our own, while it lives. To re- 
strict the redman now would send him to an un- 
righteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions 
to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and 
a superb gift for stylistic expression. He is the 
living artist in our midst, and we need not think of 
him as merely the anthropological variation or as 
an archaeological diversion merely. He proves the 

28 



THE RED MAN 

importance of synthetic registration in peoples. He 
has created his system for himself, from substance 
on, through outline down to every convincing de- 
tail. We are in a position always of selecting de- 
tails in the hope of constructing something usable 
for ourselves. It is the superficial approach. We 
are imitators because we have by nature or force of 
circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we 
can. We merely "impose" something. We can 
not improve upon what the redman offers us in his 
own way. To "impose" something — that is the 
modern culture. The interval of imposition is our 
imaginary interval of creation. The primitives cre- 
ated a complete cosmos for themselves, an entire 
principle. I want merely, then, esthetic recognition 
in full of the contribution of the redman as artist, 
as one of the finest artists of time; the poetic red- 
man ceremonialist, celebrant of the universe as he 
sees it, and master among masters of the art of 
symbolic gesture. It is pitiable to dismiss him from 
our midst. He needs rather royal invitation to re- 
main and to persist, and he can persist only by ex- 
pressing himself in his own natural and distinguished 
way, as is the case with all peoples, and all indi- 
viduals, indeed. 



29 



WHITMAN AND CEZANNE 

It is interesting to observe that in two fields of 
expression, those of painting and poetry, the two 
most notable innovators, Whitman and Cezanne 
bear a definite relationship in point of similarity 
of ideals and in their attitudes toward esthetic prin- 
ciples. Both of these men were so true to their 
respective ideals that they are worth considering at 
the same time in connection with each other: 
Cezanne with his desire to join the best that existed 
in the impressionistic principle with the classical arts 
of other times, or as he called it, to create an art 
like the Louvre out of impressionism. We shall 
find him striving always toward actualities, toward 
the realization of beauty as it is seen to exist in the 
real, in the object itself, whether it be mountain or 
apple or human, the entire series of living things 
in relation to one another. 

It is consistent that Cezanne, like all pioneers, 
was without prescribed means, that he had to spend 
his life inventing for himself those terms and meth- 
ods which would best express his feelings about na- 
ture. It is natural that he admired the precision 
of Bouguereau, it is also quite natural that he should 
have worshipped in turn, Delacroix, Courbet, and 
without doubt, the mastery of Ingres, and it is in- 

30 



WHITMAN AND CEZANNE 

dicative too that he felt the frank force of Manet. 
It was his special distinction to strive toward a sim- 
ple presentation of simple things, to want to paint 
"that which existed between himself and the object," 
and to strive to solidify the impressionistic concep- 
tion with a greater realization of form in space, the 
which they had so much ignored. That he achieved 
this in a satisfying manner may be observed in the 
best of his landscapes and still-lifes, and in some of 
the figure studies also. The endeavor to eliminate 
all aspects of extraneous conception by dismissing 
the quality of literature, of poetry and romance from 
painting, was the exact characteristic which made 
him what he is for us today, the pioneer in the field 
of modern art. It was significant enough when he 
once said to Renoir, that it took him twenty years 
to find out that painting was not sculpture. Those 
earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evi- 
dence of this worthy deduction. It was significant, 
too, when he said that Gaugin was but "a flea on 
his back," and that "he does nothing but paint Chi- 
nese images." 

The phrase that brings these two strikingly orig- 
inal personages in art together is the one of Cezanne : 
"I remain the primitive of the way I have discov- 
ered" ; and that of Whitman, which comes if I am 
not mistaken from Democratic Vistas, though it may 
be from elsewhere in Whitman's prose, running 
chiefly: "I only wish to indicate the way for the 
innumerable poets that are to come after me," etc., 

31 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

and "I warn you this is not a book, this is a man." 
7 hese two geniuses are both of one piece as to their 
esthetic intention, despite the great gulf that lies 
between their concepts of, and their attitudes toward 
life. For the one, life was a something to stay 
close to always, for the other, it was something to 
be afraid of to an almost abnormal degree; Whit- 
man and his door never closed, Cezanne and his 
door seldom or never opened, indeed, were heavily 
padlocked against the intrusion of the imaginary 
outsider. These are the geniuses who have done 
most for these two arts of the present time, it is 
Whitman and Cezanne who have clarified the sleep- 
ing eye and withheld it from being totally blinded, 
from the onslaughts of jaded tradition. 

There were in Cezanne the requisite gifts for 
selection, and for discarding all useless encum- 
brances, there was in him the great desire for puri- 
fication, or of seeing the superb fact in terms of 
itself, majestically; and if not always serenely, 
serenity was nevertheless his passionate longing. 
He saw what there was for him in those old and 
accepted masters who meant most to him, and he 
saw also what there was for him in that newest of 
old masters, which was also in its way the assumed 
discovery of our time, he saw the relativity of 
Greco's beautiful art to the art of his own making. 
He saw that here was a possible and applicable 
architectonic suited to the objects of his newly con- 
ceived principles, he felt in Greco the magnetic 

32 



WHITMAN AND CEZANNE 

tendency of one thing toward another in nature, 
that trees and hills and valleys and people were not 
something sitting still for his special delectation, but 
that they were constantly aspiring to fruition, either 
physical, mental, or let us say, spiritual, even when 
the word is applied to the so-termed inanimate ob- 
jects. He felt the "palpitancy," the breathing of all 
things, the urge outward of all life toward the light 
which helps it create and recreate itself. He felt 
this "movement" in and about things, and this it is 
that gives his pictures that sensitive life quality which 
lifts them beyond the aspect of picture-making or 
even mere representation. They are not cold stud- 
ies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations 
of living substances striving toward each other, lend- 
ing each other their individual activities until his 
canvases become, as one might name them, ensem- 
bles of animation, orchestrated life. We shall, I 
think, find this is what Greco did for Cezanne, and 
it is Cezanne who was among the first of moderns, 
if not the first, to appreciate that particular aspira- 
tional quality in the splendid pictures of Greco. 
They "move" toward their design, they were lifted 
by the quality of their organization into spaces in 
which they were free to carry on the fine illusion of 
life. 

Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being 
more things in one than Cezanne, his task has been 
in some ways greater, more difficult, and may we 
say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's in- 

33 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

clusivcness was at one and the same time his virtue 
and his defect. For mystical reasons, it was im- 
perative for him to include all things in himself, and 
so he set about enumerating all those elements which 
were in him, and of which he was so devoted and 
affectionate a part. That he could leave nothing 
out was, it may be said, his strongest esthetical de- 
fect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose 
and bring together those elements as we conceive 
it. It is the mark of good taste to reject that which 
is unessential, and the "tact of omission," well ex- 
emplified in Cezanne, has been found excellently 
axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman 
to catalogue in detail the entire obvious universe 
that makes many of his pages a strain on the mind 
as well as on the senses, and the eye especially. The 
absolute enforcement of this gift of omission in 
painting makes it easier for the artist, in that his 
mind is perforce engrossed with the idea of sim- 
plification, directness, and an easy relationship of 
the elements selected for presentation to each other. 
It is the quality of "living-ness" in Cezanne that 
sends his art to the heights of universality, which 
is another way of naming the classical vision, or 
the masterly conception, and brings him together 
with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get 
all this in all the great masters of painting and lit- 
erature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens, and the 
Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very master- 
ing of life which makes all art great, and all artists 

34 



WHITMAN AND CEZANNE 

into geniuses. It is the specializing on ideas which 
shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt the same 
gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cezanne's 
that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. 
The element in common with these two exceptional 
creators is liberation. They have done more, these 
modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist, 
and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than 
any other men of modern time. Through them, 
painting and poetry have become literally free, and 
through them it is that the young painters and poets 
have sought new fields for self deliverance Disci- 
pleship does not hold out long with the truly under- 
standing. Those who really know what original- 
ity is are not long the slave of the power of imi- 
tation: it is the gifted assimilator that suffers most 
under the spell of mastery. Legitimate influence is 
a quality which all earnest creators learn to handle 
at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it 
seems to me, revealing well the gift of understand- 
ing, and as a result we have a better variety of 
painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of 
this so called modern esthetic epidemic. 

The real younger creators are learning the dif- 
ference between surface and depth, between exterior 
semblances, and the underlying substances. Both 
Whitman and Cezanne stand together in the name 
of one common purpose, freedom from character- 
istics not one's own. They have taught the creators 
of this time to know what classicism really is, that 

35 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

it is the outline of all things that endure. They 
have both shown that it is not idiosyncrasy alone 
which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy is but the 
husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the 
constituent essential for genius. For genius is noth- 
ing but the name for higher perception, the greater 
degree of understanding. Cezanne's fine landscapes 
and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its 
gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it 
reaches the same height in the mind. They walk 
together out of a vivid past, these two geniuses, 
opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for 
the artists of now, and to come. They are the gate- 
way for our modern esthetic development, the 
prophets of the new time. They are most of all, 
the primitives of the .way they have begun, they 
have voiced most of all the imperative need of es- 
sential personalism, of direct expression out of direct 
experience, with an eye to nothing but quality and 
proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas 
were both simple in the extreme, and of immense 
worth to us in their respective spheres. We may 
think of them as the giants of the beginning of the 
twentieth century, with the same burning desire to 
enlarge the general scope of vision, and the finer 
capacity for individual experience. 



36 



ALBERT P. RYDER 

Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that 
strict passivity of mental vision which calls into being 
the elusive yet fixed element the mystic Blake so 
ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that 
element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work 
is of the essence of poetry; it is alien to the realm 
of esthetics pure, for it has very special spiritual his- 
tories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat akin 
to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest 
Michel's wide wastes of prodigal sky and duneland 
with their winding roads that have no end, his ever- 
shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy 
stretches of land that go their austere way to the 
edges of some vacant sea. They suggest, too, those 
less remote but perhaps even more aloof spaces of 
solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his 
deeper hours, that haunting sense of subtle habita- 
tion, that acute invasion of either wind or soft fleck 
of light or bright presence in a breadth of shadow, 
as if a breath of living essences always somehow 
pervaded those mystic woodland or still lowland 
scenes. But highly populate as these pictures of 
Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet 
that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, 
the remoter plain, they never quite surrender to that 

37 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

ghostllness which possesses the pictures of our 
Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling 
of there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, 
some bodily shape seeking a solitude of its own. I 
recall no other landscapes impressed with a more 
terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," 
to my thinking a finality in landscape creation. 

There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, 
in Courbet, but there is never a rest for the eye or 
the mind or the spirit in those most awesome of 
pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as 
they are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend 
of Giorgione. There is always splendor in them 
but it is the splendor of the dream given over to a 
genius more powerful than the vision which has con- 
jured them forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany 
in which they have their being; he has inscribed for 
us that utter homelessness of the spirit in the far 
tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; 
there is suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the 
spirit, that brcathlessness which overtakes the soul 
in search of the consummation of beauty. 

Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a di- 
rect visional analogy between "The Flying Dutch- 
man" and the excessively pictorial stanzas of "The 
Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in 
this excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this pro- 
found spectacle of the soul's despair in conflict with 
wind and wave. Could any picture contain more of 
that remoteness of the world of our real heart as 

38 



ALBERT P. RYDER 

well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that 
world in no official sense but only as a guest or a 
courtly spectator? No artist, I ought to say, was 
ever more master of his ideas and less master of the 
medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of 
his finest canvases a most pitiable display of igno- 
rance which will undoubtedly shorten their life by 
many years. 

I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me 
when I saw my first Ryder, a marine of rarest gran- 
deur and sublimity, incredibly small in size, incred- 
ibly large in its emotion — just a sky and a single 
vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, 
I think, the special messenger of the sea's beauty, 
the confidant of its majesties, its hauteurs, its su- 
premacies; for he was born within range of the sea 
and all its legends have hovered with him contin- 
ually. Since that time I have seen a number of 
other pictures either in the artist's possession or else- 
where : "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," can- 
vases from The Tempest and Macbeth in that 
strange little world of chaos that was his home, his 
hermitage, so distraught with debris of the world 
for which he could seem to find no other place; I 
have spent some of the rare and lovelier moments 
of my experience with this gentlest and sweetest of 
other-world citizens; I have felt with ever-living de- 
light the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his 
smile and heard that music of some far-away world 
which was his laughter; I have known that wisdom 

39 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

which is once and for all wisdom for the artist, that 
confidence and trust that for the real artist there is 
but one agency for the expression of self in terms 
of beauty, the eye of the imagination, that mystical 
third somewhere in the mind which transposes all 
that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the 
imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, 
living ever outside the realm of theory. 

He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have 
thought of him as the heir and successor to some of 
Corot's haunting graces; but there was all the dif- 
ference between them that there is between lyric 
pure and tragic pure. Ryder has for once tran- 
scribed all outer semblances by means of a personal- 
ity unrelated to anything other than itself, an imag- 
ination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically 
to our Eastern geography. In his autographic qual- 
ity he is certainly our finest genius, the most crea- 
tive, the most racial. For our genius, at its best, 
is the genius of the evasive; we are born lovers of 
the secret element, the mystery in things. 

How many of our American painters have given 
real attention to Ryder? I find him so much the 
legend among professional artists, this master of 
arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, 
this real creator of pattern, this first of all creators 
of tragic landscape, whose pictures are sacred to 
those that revere distinction and power in art. He 
had in him that finer kind of reverence for the ele- 
ment of beauty which finds all things somehow 

40 



ALBERT P. RYDER 

lovely. He understood best of all the meaning of 
the grandiose, of everything that is powerful; none 
of his associates in point of time rose to just that 
sublimated experience; not Fuller, not Martin, not 
Blakelock, though each of these was touched to a 
special expression. They are more derivative than 
Ryder, more the children of Barbizon. 

Ryder gave us first and last an incomparable sense 
of pattern and austerity of mood. He saw with an 
all too pitiless and pitiful eye the element of help- 
lessness in things, the complete succumbing of things 
in nature to those elements greater than they that 
wield a fatal power. Ryder was the last of the ro- 
mantics, the last of that great school of impressive 
artistry, as he was the first of our real painters and 
the greatest in vision. He was a still companion 
of Blake in that realm of the beyond, the first citizen 
of the land of Luthany. He knew the fine distinc- 
tion between drama and tragedy, the tragedy which 
nature prevails upon the sensitive to accept. He 
was the painter poet of the immanent in things. 



41 



WINSLOW HOMER 

In Winslow Homer we have yankeeism of the 
first order, turned to a creditable artistic account. 
With a fierce feeling for truth, a mania, almost, 
for actualities, there must have been somewhere in 
his make-up a gentleness, a tenderness and refine- 
ment which explain his fine appreciation of the genius 
of the place he had in mind to represent. There is 
not an atom of legend in Homer, it is always and 
always narrative of the obvious world. There is 
at once the essential ciramatic import ruling the 
scene. With him it is nothing but dramatic rela- 
tionship, the actionary tendency of the facts them- 
selves, in nature. You are held by him constantly 
to the bold and naked theme, and you are left to 
wander in the imagination only among the essentials 
of simple and common realism. 

Narrative then, first and last with Homer, and 
the only creative aspect of his pictures is concealed 
in the technique. The only touch of invention in 
them is the desire to improve the language they 
speak. Dramatic always, I do not call them theat- 
ric excepting in the case of one picture that I know, 
called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the Metro- 
politan Museum, reminding me much of the com- 
monplace, "Chateau de Chillon" of Courbet's, 

42 



WINSLOW HOMER 

neither of these pictures being of any value in the 
careers of their authors. But once you sat on the 
rocks of Maine, and watched the climbing of the surf 
up the morning sky after a heavy storm at sea, you 
reahze the force of Homer's gift for the realities. 
His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a 
work of art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute 
as is the yankee nature itself, or rather to say, the 
original yankee, which was pioneer then in a so 
rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of 
Thoreau, but without the genius of Thoreau for the 
poetry of things. 

Homer's pictures give you nothing but the bare 
fact told in the better class terms of illustration, for 
he was illustrator, first of all. While the others 
were trying to make a little American Barbizon of 
their own, there were Homer, Ryder, Fuller, Mar- 
tin, working alone for such vastly opposite ideas, 
and yet, of these men, four of them were expressing 
such highly imaginative ideas, and Homer was the 
unflinching realist among them. I do not know 
where Homer started, but I believe it was the sea 
at Prout's Neck that taught him most. I think that 
William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston must 
ha,ve seemed like infant Michelangelos then, for 
th^re is still about them a sturdiness which we see 
little of in the American art of that time, or even 
now for that matter. They had a certain massive 
substance, proving the force of mind and personal- 
ity which was theirs, and while these men were prov- 

43 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

ing the abundance and warmth of themselves, 
Homer was the frozen one among them. Nature 
was nature to him, and that alone he realized, and 
yet it was not precisely slavish imitation that im- 
pelled him. 

There was in him a very creditable sense of selec- 
tion, — as will be seen especially in the water colours, 
so original with him, so gifted in their power of 
treatment — one of the few great masters of the 
medium the world has known. He knew the mean- 
ing of wash as few since have known it, he knew 
that it has scale and limitation of its own, and for 
all that, infinite suggestibility. Not Turner or 
Whistler have excelled him, and I do not know of 
anyone who has equalled him in understanding of 
this medium outside of Dodge Macknight and John 
Marin. It is in these so expressive paintings on 
paper that you feel the real esthetic longing as well 
as a certain contribution in Homer, the desire to 
realize himself and to release himself from too 
slavish imitation of nature and the too rigid con- 
sideration of truth. He was finer in technique than 
perhaps any that I have mentioned, though the two 
modern men have seconded him very closely, and in 
point of vision have, I am certain, surpassed him. 
Homer arrived because of his power to express what 
he wished to say, though his reach was far less lofty 
than theirs. He was essentially on the ground, and 
wanted to paint the very grip of his own feet on the 
rocks. He wanted the inevitability put down in 

44 



WINSLOW HOMER 

recognizable form. He had not feeling for the hint 
or the suggestion until he came to the water-color, 
which is of course most essentially that sort of me- 
dium. He knew its scope and its limitations and 
never stepped out of its boundaries, and he achieved 
a fine mastery in it. His imitators will never ar- 
rive at his severity because they are not flint yan- 
kee. They have not the hard head and snappy 
tongue. It was yankee crabbedness that gave 
Homer his grip on the idea he had in mind. Flor- 
ida lent a softer tone to what Maine rocks could 
not give him. He is American from skin to skele- 
ton, and a leader among yankee as well as Amer- 
ican geniuses. He probably hated as much as 
Thoreau, and in his steely way admired as much. 
It was fire from the flintlock in them both, though 
nature had a far softer and loftier persuasion with 
the Concord philosopher and naturalist. 

Homer remains a figure in our American culture 
through his feeling for reality. He has learned 
through slavery to detail to put down the essential 
fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He 
has a little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none 
whatever of his sense of the imaginative. It was 
enough for him to classicize the realistic incident. 
He impels me to praise through his yankee insist- 
ence upon integrity. Story is story with Homer and 
he leaves legend to itself. It is the narrative of 
the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and typical. 
He never stepped outside of his yankee determina- 

45 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

tion. Homer has sent the art of water colour paint- 
ing to a very high place in world consideration. 
He cannot be ignored as a master in this field. His 
paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings 
of fact, dramatically considered. He offers noth- 
ing else. Once you have seen these realistic sea 
pictures, you may want to remember and you may 
want to forget, but they call for consideration. 
They are true in their living appreciation of reality. 
He knew the sea like the old salts that were his 
neighbors, and from accounts he was as full of the 
tang of the sea as they. He was a foe to compro- 
mise and a despiser of imposition. The best and 
most impersonal of him is in his work, for he never 
ventured to express philosophies, ethics, or morals 
in terms of picture-painting. That is to his credit 
at least. He was concerned with illustration first 
and last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. 
He taught the proceeding school of illustrators 
much in the significance of verity, and in the ways 
and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. 
What the stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold 
engravings of his time taught him, he conferred 
upon the later men in terms of freedom of tech- 
nique. And at the same time he rose a place, as 
painter and artist of no mean order, by a certain 
distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling 
for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here 
it was necessary by virtue of the limitations of the 
medium. ' 

. 46 



WINSLOW HOMER 

If 

Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time 
only because his mind was too local. There is 
nothing of universal appeal in him. His realism 
will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces 
of Courbet, and I shall include Ryder as well. 
Courbet was a fine artist, and so was Ryder, and 
both had the advantage of exceptional imagination. 
Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast 
and typify excellently the two poles in the New Eng- 
land temper, both in art and in life. Homer as 
realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate 
realism as best he could in the most distinguished 
terms at the disposal of his personality. He suc- 
ceeded admirably. 

Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the Amer- 
ican temper at least, and sends the lighter men 
away with his roughness, as doubtless he sent the 
curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth 
he poured upon them. He had lived so much in 
the close association of the roughest elements in ex- 
istence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that glides 
over and above them defiantly, that he had without 
doubt taken on the character of them. The por- 
trait of Homer gives him as one would expect him 
to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage 
bore a ferocity that had to be met with a rocky cer- 
tainty. It is evident there was no fooling him. He 
was filled with yankee tenacity and yankee courage. 
Homer is what you would expect to find if you were 
told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or 

47 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

"Perkins Cove," or any of the inlets of the Maine 
coast. These sea people live so much with the 
roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined 
to acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure 
to be, they take on the hard edges of a man's tem- 
per in accordance with the jaggedness of the shores 
on which they live. The man around the rocks 
looks so very like the profiles one sees in the rocks 
themselves. They have absorbed the energy of the 
dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be 
sure that life around the sea in New England is no 
easy existence ; and they give out the same salty 
equivalent in human association. 

If you have lived by the sea, you have learned 
the significance of the bravery of sea people, and 
you learn to understand and excuse the sharpness 
of them which is given them from battle with the 
elemental facts they are confronted with at all times. 
That is the character of Homer, that is the quality 
of his painting. That is what makes him original 
in the American sense, and so recognizable in the 
New England sense. He is one of New England's 
strongest spokesmen, and takes his place by the side 
of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, 
and such representative temperaments, and it is this 
quality that distinguishes him from men like Inness, 
Wyant, and the less typical painters. It is obvious, 
too, that he never painted any other coast, except- 
ing of course Florida, in the water colours. 

48 



WINSLOW HOMER 

It was Florida that produced the chef d'oeuvre 
in him. It was Maine that taught him the force 
of the southern aspect. Romancer among the real- 
istic facts of nature, he might be called, for he did 
not merely copy nature. He did invest things with 
their own suggestive reality, and he surmounted his 
earlier gifts for exact illustration by this other finer 
gift for romantic appreciation. Homer was an 
excellent narrator, as will be seen in the "Gulf 
Stream" picture in the Metropolitan Museum. It 
has the powers of Jack London and of Conrad in 
it. Homer was intense, vigorous, and masculine. 
If he was harsh in his characteristics, he was one 
who knew the worth of economy in emotion. He 
was one with his idea and his metier, and that is 
sufficient. 



49 



AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING 

There are certain painters who join themselves 
together in a kind of grouping, which, whether they 
wish to think of themselves in this light or not, 
have become in the matter of American values in 
painting, a fixed associative aspect of painting in 
America. When we speak of American painting, 
the choice is small, but definite as to the number of 
artists, and the type of art they wished themselves 
to be considered for. From the Hudson River 
grouping, which up to Inness is not more marked 
than as a set of men copying nature with scrupulous 
fidelity to detail, rather than conveying any special 
feeling or notion of what a picture of, or the land- 
scape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the 
American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, 
most of whom returned with a rich sense of rhetor- 
ical conventionalities in art — men like William Mor- 
ris Hunt and Washington Allston — we may turn to 
that other group of men as being far more typical 
of our soil and temper. I mean artists such as 
Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryder, George Fuller, 
and the later Winslow Homer who certainly did re- 
ceive more recognition than any of them prior to 
his death. 

Martin, Ryder, and Fuller could not have en- 
joyed much in the way of appreciation outside of a 

50 



AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING 

few artists of their time, and even now they may be 
said to be the artists for artists. It is reasonable 
to hope that they were not successful, since that 
which was a la mode in the expression of their time 
was essentially of the dry Academy. One would 
hardly think of Homer Martin's "Border of the 
Seine" landscape in the Metropolitan Museum, 
hardly more then than now, and it leaves many a 
painter flat in appreciation of its great dignity, aus- 
terity, reserve, and for the distinguished quality of 
its stylism. What Martin may have gotten, dur- 
ing his stay in Europe, which is called impression- 
ism is, it must be said, a more aristocratic type of 
impressionism than issued from the Monet follow- 
ers. Martin must then have been knowing some- 
thing of the more dignified intellectualism of Pissarro 
and of Sisley, those men who have been the last to 
reach the degrees of appreciation due them In the 
proper exactitude. 

We cannot think of Martin as ever having carried 
off academic medals during his period. We cannot 
think of Martin as President of the Academy, which 
position was occupied by a far inferior artist who 
was likewise carried away by Impressionism, namely 
Alden Weir. The actual attachment in character- 
istic of introspective temper in Alden Weir is not 
so removed from Martin, Fuller and Ryder as might 
be imagined; he is more like Martin perhaps though 
far less profound In his sense of mystery; Fuller 
being more the romanticist and Ryder in my esti- 

51 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

matlon the greatest romanticist, and artist as well, 
of all of these men. But Alden Weir failed to 
carry off any honor as to distinctive qualities and 
invention. A genial aristocrat if you will, but hav- 
ing for me no marked power outside of a Barbi- 
zonian interest in nature with a kind of mystical 
detachedness. 

But in the consideration of painters like Martin, 
Fuller and Ryder we are thinking chiefly of their 
relation to their time as well as their relation to 
what is to come in America. America has had as 
much painting considering its youth as could be ex- 
pected of it and the best of it has been essentially 
native and indigenous. But in and out of the vari- 
'ous influences and traditional tendencies, these sev- 
eral artists with fine imaginations, typical American 
imaginations, were proceeding with their own pe- 
culiarly original and significantly personal expres- 
sions. They represent up to their arrival, and long 
after as well, all there is of real originality in Amer- 
ican painting, and they remain for all time as fine 
examples of artists with purely native imaginations, 
working out at great cost their own private salva- 
tions for public discovery at a later time. 

All these men were poor men with highly distin- 
guished aristocratic natures and powerful physiques, 
as to appearances, with mentalities much beyond the 
average. When an exhibition of modern American 
painting is given, as it surely will and must be, these 
men and not the Barbizonian echoes as represented 

52 



AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING 

by Inness, Wyant & Co., will represent for us the 
really great beginning of art in America, There 
will follow naturally artists like Twachtman and 
Robinson, as likewise Kenneth Hayes Miller and 
Arthur B. Davies for reasons that I think are rather 
obvious: both Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies 
having skipped over the direct influence of impres- 
sionism by reason of their attachment to Renais- 
sance ideas; having joined themselves by conviction 
in perhaps slight degrees to aspects of modern paint- 
ing. Miller is, one might say, too intellectually de- 
liberate to allow for spontaneities which mere en- 
thusiasms encourage. Miller is emotionally thrilled 
by Renoir but he is never quite swept. His essen- 
tial conservatism hinders such violence. It would 
be happier for him possibly if the leaning were still 
more pronounced. 

The jump to modernism in Arthur B. Davies re- 
sults in the same sort of way as admixture of in- 
fluence though it is more directly appreciable in him. 
Davies Is more willing, by reason of his elastic tem- 
per and intellectual vivacity, to stray into the field 
of new ideas with a simple though firm belief, that 
they are good while they last, no matter how long 
they last. Davies is almost a propagandist in his 
feeling for and admiration of the ultra-modern 
movement. Miller is a questioner and ponders 
long upon every point of consequence or inconse- 
quence. He is a metaphysical analyst which is per- 
haps the extraneous element in his painting. In 

S3 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

his etching, that is, the newest of it, one feels the 
sense of the classical and the modern joined together 
and by the classical I mean the quality of Ingres, 
conjoined with modern as in Renoir, relieved of the 
influence of Italian Renaissance. 

But I do not wish to lose sight of these several 
forerunners in American art, Martin, Ryder and 
Fuller who, in their painting, may be linked not 
without relativity to our artists in literary imagina- 
tion, Hawthorne and Poe. Fuller is conspicuously 
like Hawthorne, not by his appreciation of witch- 
craft merely, but by his feeling for those eery pres- 
ences which determine the fates of men and women 
in their time. Martin is the purer artist for me 
since he seldom or never resorted to the literary emo- 
tion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in 
the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up ex- 
pression entirely from literary experience. Albert 
Ryder achieves most by reason of his vaster poetic 
sensibility — his Homeric instincts for the drama and 
by a very original power for arabesque. He is 
alone among the Americans in his unique gift for 
pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most 
original painter as Poe takes his place as our most 
original poet who had of course one of the great- 
est and most perfect imaginations of his time and 
possibly of all time. 

But it is these several painters I speak of, Mar- 
tin, Ryder, and Fuller, who figure for us as the 
originators of American indigenous painting. They 

54 



AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING 

will not be copied for they further nothing beyond 
themselves. No influence of these painters has 
been notable, excepting for a time in the early ex- 
perience of one of the younger modernists who, by 
reason of definite associations of birthright and rela- 
tivity of environment, essayed to claim Albert Ryder 
as a very definite influence; just as Courbet and 
Corot must in their ways have been powerful in- 
fluences upon Ryder himself. Albert Ryder is too 
much of a figure to dismiss here with group-rela- 
tionship, he must be treated of separately. So far 
then, there is no marked evidence that the influence 
of Fuller or Martin was powerful enough to carry 
beyond themselves. They had no tenets or theories 
other than those of personal clarification. All three 
remained the hermit radicals of life, as they remain 
isolated examples in American art; and all of them 
essentially of New England, in that they were con- 
spicuously introspective, and shut in upon their own 
exclusive experience. 

But for all these variances, we shall find Homer 
Martin, George Fuller, and Albert Ryder forming 
the first nucleus for a definite value in strictly Amer- 
ican painting. They were conscious of nothing 
really outside of native associations and native de- 
ductions. The temper of them is as essentially 
American as the quality of them is essentially East- 
ern in flavor. They seldom ventured beyond more 
than a home-spun richness of color, though in 

55 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Ryder's case Monticelli had assisted very definitely 
in his notion of the volume of tone. We find here 
then despite the impress of artists like William 
Morris Hunt, Washington Allston, and the later 
Inness with the still later Winslow Homer, that 
gripping and relentless realist who took hold of the 
newer school of painter-illustrators, that the artists 
treated of here may be considered as the most im- 
portant phase of American painting in the larger 
sense of the term. If I were to assist in the ar- 
rangement of an all American exhibition to show 
the trend toward individualism I should begin with 
Martin, Fuller and Ryder. I should then proceed 
to Winslow Homer, John H. Twachtman, Theodore 
Robinson, Hayes Miller, Arthur B. Davies, Rock- 
well Kent, then to those who come under the 
eighteen-ninety tendency in painting, namely the 
Whistler-Goya-Velasquez influence. 

From this it will be found that an entirely new 
development had taken place among a fairly large 
group of younger men who came, and very ear- 
nestly, under the Cezannesque influence. It may be 
said that the choice of these men is a wise one for it 
Is conspicuous among artists of today that since 
Cezanne art will never, cannot ever be the same, 
just as with Delacroix and Courbet a French art 
could never have remained the same. Impression- 
ism will be found to have had a far greater value 
as a suggestive influence than as a creative one. It 

56 



AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING 

brought light In as a scientific aspect into modern 
painting and that is its valuable contribution. So 
it is that with Cezanne the world is conscious of 
a new power that will never be effectually shaken 
off, since the principles that are involved in the in- 
tention of Cezanne are of too vital importance to be 
treated with lightness of judgment. Such valuable 
ideas as Cezanne contributes must be accepted al- 
most as dogma, albeit valuable dogma. Influence is 
a conscious and necessary factor in the development 
of all serious minded artists, as we have seen in the 
Instances of all Important ones. 

So it Is I feel that the real art of America, and 
It can, I think, justly be said that there Is such, will 
be headed by the imaginative artists I have named 
In point of their value as indigenous creators, having 
worked out their artistic destinies on home soil with 
all the virility of creators In the finer sense of the 
term. They have assisted In the establishment of 
a native tradition which without question has by this 
time a definite foundation. The public must be 
made aware of their contribution to a native pro- 
duction. It will no doubt be a matter for surprise 
to many people In the world today that art In gen- 
eral is more national or local than It has ever been, 
due mostly to the recent upheaval, which has been 
of great service to the re-establishment of art In- 
terest and art appreciation everywhere in the mod- 
ern world. Art, like life, has had to begin all over 

57 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

again, for the very end of the world had been made 
visible at last. The artist may look safely over an 
utterly new horizon, which is the only encourage- 
ment the artist of today can hope for. 



58 



MODERN ART IN AMERICA 

The question may be asked, what is the hope of 
modern art in America? The first reply would be 
that modern art will one day be realized in America 
if only from experience we learn that all things hap- 
pen in America by means of the epidemical princi- 
ple. It is of little visible use that single individuals, 
by sitting in the solitary confinement of their as yet 
little understood enthusiasms, shall hope to achieve 
what is necessary for the American idea, precisely 
as necessary for us here as for the peoples of Eu- 
rope who have long since recognized that any move- 
ment toward expression is a movement of unques- 
tionable importance. Until the moment when public 
sincerity and the public passion for excitement is 
stimulated, the vague art interests of America will 
go on in their dry and conventional manner. The 
very acute discernment of Maurice Vlaminck. that 
"intelligence is international, stupidity is national, 
art is local" is a valuable deduction to make, and ap- 
plies in the two latter instances as admirably to 
America as to any other country. Our national 
stupidity in matters of esthetic modernity is a mat- 
ter for obvious acceptance, and not at all for amaze- 
ment. 

That art is local is likewise just as true of America 
as of any other country, and despite the judgment 

59 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

of stodgy minds, there is a definite product which 
is peculiar to our specific temper and localized sensi- 
bility as it is of any other country which is nameable. 
Despite the fact that impressionism is still exaggera- 
tion, and that large sums are still being paid for a 
"sheep-piece" of Charles Jacque, as likewise for a 
Ridgeway Knight, there is a well defined grouping 
of younger painters working for a definitely local- 
ized idea of modernism, just as in modern poetry 
there is a grouping of poets in America who are 
adding new values to the English language, as well 
as assisting in the realization of a freshly evolved 
localized personality in modern poetics. 

Art in America is like a patent medicine, or a 
vacuum cleaner. It can hope for no success until 
ninety million people know what it is. The spread 
of art as "culture" in America is from all appear- 
ances having little or no success because stupidity 
in such matters is so national. There is a very 
vague consideration of modern art among the direc- 
tors of museums and among art dealers, but the com- 
prehension is as vague as the interest. Outside of 
a Van Gogh exhibition, a few Matisses, now and 
then a Cezanne exhibited with great feeling of con- 
descension, there is little to show the American pub- 
lic that art is as much a necessity as a substantial 
array of food is to an empty stomach. The public 
hunger cannot groan for what it does not recog- 
nize as real nourishment. There is no reason in 
the world why America does not have as many 

60 



MODERN ART IN AMERICA 

chances to see modern art as Europe has, save for 
minor matters of distance. The peoples of the 
world are alike, sensibilities are of the same nature 
everywhere among the so-called civilized, and it 
must be remembered always that the so-called primi- 
tive races invented for tlieir own racial salvation 
what was not to be found ready made for them. 
Modern art is just as much of a necessity to us as 
art was to the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks. 
Those peoples have the advantage of us only be- 
cause they were in a higher state of culture as a racial 
unit. They have no more of a monopoly upon the 
idea of rhythm and organization than we have, be- 
cause that which was typical of the human conscious- 
ness then, is typical of it now. As a result of the 
war, there has been, it must be said, a heightening 
of national consciousness in all countries, because 
creative minds that were allowed to survive were 
sent home to struggle with the problem of their 
own soil. 

There is no reason whatever for believing that 
America cannot have as many good artists as any 
other country. It simply does not have them because 
the integrity of the artist is trifled with by the in- 
triguing agencies of materialism. Painters find the 
struggle too keen and it is easy to become the adver- 
tising designer, or the merchant in painting, which is 
what many of our respectable artists have become. 
The lust for prosperity takes the place of artistic 
integrity and courage. But America need not be 

6i 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

surprised to find that it has a creditable grouping of 
artists sufficiently interested in the value of modern 
art as an expression of our time, men and possibly 
some women, who feel that art is a matter of private 
aristocratic satisfaction at least, until the public is 
awakened to the idea that art is an essentially local 
affair and the more local it becomes by means of 
comprehension of the international character, the 
truer it will be to the place in which it is produced. 

A catalogue of names will suffice to indicate the 
character and variation of the localized degree of 
expression we are free to call American in type: 
Morgan Russell, S. Macdonald Wright, Arthur G. 
Dove, William Yarrow, Dickinson, Thomas H. 
Benton, Abraham Walkowitz, Max Weber, Ben 
Benn, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Charles 
Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, Wil- 
liam McFee, Man Ray, Walt Kuhn, John Covert, 
Morton Schamberg, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, 
Rex Slinkard. Added to these, the three modern 
photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, 
and Paul Strand must be included. Besides these 
indigenous names, shall we place the foreign artists 
whose work falls into line in the movement toward 
modern art in America, Joseph Stella, Marcel 
Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, Eli Nadelman. There 
may be no least questioning as to how much success 
all of these artists would have in their respective 
ways in the various groupings that prevail in Europe 
at this time. They would be recognized at once 

62 



MODERN ART IN AMERICA 

for the authenticity of their experience and for 
their integrity as artists gifted with international in- 
telligence. There is no reason to feel that prevail- 
ing organizations like the Society of Independent 
Artists, Inc., and the Societe Anonyme, Inc., will not 
bear a great increase of influence and power upon 
the public, as there is every reason to believe 
that at one time or another the public will realize 
what is being done for them by these societies, 
as well as what was done by the so famous "291" 
gallery. 

The effect however is not vast enough because 
the public finds no shock in the idea of art. It is 
not melodramatic enough and America must be ap- 
pealed to through its essentially typical melodra- 
matic instincts. There is always enough music, and 
there are some who certainly can say altogether too 
much of the kind there is in this country. The same 
tiling can be said of painting. There is altogether 
too much of comfortable art, the art of the uplifted 
illustration. It is the reflex of the Anglo-Saxon 
passion for story-telling in pictures which should be 
relegated to the field of the magazines. Great art 
often tells a story but great art is always something 
plus the idea. Ordinary art does not rise above it. 

I often wonder why it is that America, which is 
essentially a country of sports and gamblers, has 
not the European courage as well as rapacity for 
fresh development in cultural matters. Can it be 
because America is not really intelligent? I should 

63 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

be embarrassed In thinking so. There is neverthe- 
less an obvious lethargy in the appreciation of cre- 
ative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned 
faith in the continual necessity for importation. 
America has a great body of assimilators, and out 
of this gift for uncreative assimilation has come 
the type of art we are supposed to accept as our 
own. It is not at all difficult to prove that America 
has now an encouraging and competent group of 
young and vigorous synthesists who are showing with 
intelligence what they have learned from the newest 
and most engaging development of art, which is to 
say — modern art. The names which have been 
inserted above are the definite indication, and one 
may go so far as to say proof, of this argument that 
modern art in America is rapidly becoming an in- 
telligently localized realization. 



64 



OUR IMAGINATIVES 

Is it vision that creates temperament or tempera- 
ment that creates vision? Physical vision Is re- 
sponsible for nearly everything in art, not the power 
to see but the way to see. It is the eye perfect or 
the eye defective that determines the kind of thing 
seen and how one sees It. It was certainly a factor 
in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he was once named 
the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive 
eye of Cezanne that taught him to register so ably 
the minor and major variations of his theme. Manet 
saw certainly far less colour than Renoir, for in the 
Renoir sense he was not a colourist at all. He him- 
self said he painted only what he saw. Sight was 
almost science with Cezanne as it was passion. 

In artists like Homer Martin there Is a something 
less than visual accuracy and something more than 
a gift of translation. There Is a distinguished in- 
terpretation of mood coupled with an almost minia- 
ture-like sense of delicate gradation, and at the same 
time a something lacking as to a sense of physical 
form. In the few specimens of Martin to be seen 
there Is, nevertheless, eminent distinction paramount. 
He was an artist of "oblique Integrity" : He saw 
unquestionably at an angle, but the angle was a beau- 

65 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

tiful one, and while many of his associates were 
doing American Barbizon, he was giving forth a shy, 
yet rare kind of expression, always a little symbolic 
in tendency, with the mood far more predominant. 
In "The sand dunes of Ontario" there will be found 
at once a highly individualistic feeling for the waste 
places of the world. There is never so much as a 
hint of banality in his selection. He never resorts 
to stock rhetoric. 

Martin will be remembered for his singularly 
personal touch along with men like Fuller and Ryder. 
He is not as dramatic as either of these artists, but 
he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He 
was, I think, actually afraid of repetition, a charac- 
teristic very much in vogue in his time, either con- 
scious or unconscious, in artists like Inness, Wyant, 
and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is 
exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and 
stretches of dune and sky. It is not fog, or rain, 
or dew enveloping them. It is a certain veiled pres- 
ence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His 
picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson 
and Madison, gives you no suggestion of the "Hud- 
son River" emptiness. He was searching for pro- 
founder realities. He wanted the personality of his 
places, and he was successful, for all of his pictures 
I have seen display the magnetic touch. He 
"touched it off" vividly in all of them. They reveal 
their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method 
is personal and ample for presentation. 

66 



OUR IMAGINATIVES 

With George Fuller it was vastly different. He 
seemed always to be halting in the shadow. You 
are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest nature 
in his pictures. He impressed himself on his can- 
vases in spite of his so faulty expression. He had 
an understanding of depth but surface was strange 
to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with 
excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" 
shows a fine feeling for romance as do all of the 
other pictures of Fuller that have been publicly vis- 
ible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. 
There is the evidence of extreme reticence and mood- 
iness in Fuller always. I know little of him save that 
I believe he experienced a severity of domestic prob- 
lems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off 
hours all his life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost 
sombre order, walking in the shadow on the edge 
of a wood being almost too much of an appearance 
for him in the light of a busy world. 

Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of 
Fuller? Is there a relationship here, or is it only a 
similarity of eeriness in temper? I would suspect 
Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting 
that he could never have come to so much red in one 
place in his pictures. 

There was vigour in these strong, simple men, 
masculine in sensibility all of them, and a fine feeling 
for the poetic shades of existence. They were in- 
tensely serious men, and I think from their isolation 

67 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

in various ways, not popular in their time. Neither 
are they popular now. They will only be admired by 
artists of perception, and by laymen of keen sensi- 
bility. Whether their enforced isolations taught 
them to brood, or whether they were brooders by 
nature, it is difficult to say. I think they were all 
easterners, and this would explain away certain char- 
acteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in 
them. Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, 
Fuller in all likelihood also. Martin I know little 
of privately, but his portrait shows him to be a 
strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or 
interest in, the superficialities either of life or of art. 
Of Blakelock I can say but little, for I do not know 
him beyond a few stylish canvases which seem to 
have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than con- 
tributes to real originality, and he was one of the 
painters of repetition also. A single good Blakelock 
is beautiful, and I think he must be included among 
the American imaginatives, but I do not personally 
feel the force of him in several canvases together. 

All of these artists are singularly individual, 
dreamers like Mathew Maris and Marees of 
Europe. They all hav^e something of Coleridge 
about them, something of Poe, something of the 
"Ancient Mariner" and the "Haunted Palace", sail- 
ors in the same ship, sleepers in the same house. 
All of these men were struggling at the same time, 
the painters I mean, the same hour it might be said, 

68 



OUR IMAGINATIVES 

in the midst of conventions of a severer type of 
rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from com- 
monplace utterance. They were not affected by 
fashions. They had the one idea in mind, to express 
themselves in terms of themselves, and they were 
singularly successful in this despite the various diffi- 
culties of circumstance and of temper that attended 
them. They understood what this was better than 
anyone, and the results in varying degrees of genius 
attest to the quality of the American imagination at 
its best. 

I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a 
worthy exhibition of all of these men in one place. 
It would I am sure prove my statement that the 
eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all of 
these men have hardly once ventured into the clear 
sunlight of the world of every day. It would offset 
highly also, the superficial attitude that there is no 
invagination in American painting. We should not 
find so much of form or of colour in them In the 
stricter meaning of these ideas, as of mood. They 
might have set themselves to be disciples of William 
Blake's significant preachment, "put off intellect and 
put on imagination, the imagination is the man" ; the 
intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagina- 
tion being the natural man. There is imagination 
which by reason of its power and brilliance exceeds 
all intellectual effort, and effort at intellectualism is 
worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are 
highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do 

69 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

not or cannot know. It is the sixth sense of the 
creator. 

These artists were men alone, touched with the 
pristine significance of nature. It was pioneering of 
a difficult nature, precarious as all individual investi- 
gation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure to 
be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is 
appreciation. All of these painters are gone over 
into that place they were so eager to investigate, 
illusion or reality. Their pictures are witness here 
to their seriousness. They testify to the bright ever- 
lastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the 
world, they have left a dignified record in the art 
of a given time. Their contemporary value is at 
least inestimable. They are among the very first in 
the development of esthetics in America in point of 
merit. They made no compromise, and their record 
is clear. 

If one looks over the record of American art up 
to the period of ultra-modernism, it will be found 
that these men are the true originals among Ameri- 
can painters. We shall find outside of them and a 
very few others, so much of sameness, a certain 
academic convention which, however pronounced or 
meagre the personalities are, leave those person- 
alities in the category of "safe" painters. They do 
not disturb by an excessively intimate point of view 
toward art or toward nature. They come up to 
gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the 
inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in 

70 N. 



OUR IMAGINATIVES 

the way of Interpretive power or synthetic under- 
standing. It is the tendency to keep on the comfort- 
able side in American art. Doubtless it is more 
practical as any innovator or investigator has 
learned for himself. Artists like Ryder and Mar- 
tin and Fuller had nothing in common with market 
appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were 
sincere to the last in expressing them. 

You will find little trace of commercialism in 
these men, even when, as In the case of Martin and 
Ryder and I do not know whom else, they did panels 
for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which 
"Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of 
Ryder's in the Metropolitan Museum are doubtless 
two. They were not successful In their time because 
they could not repeat their performances. We know 
the efforts that were once made to make Ryder com- 
fortable In a conventional studio, which he Is sup- 
posed to have looked Into once; and then he dis- 
appeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each 
picture was a new event in the lives of these men, 
and had to be pondered over devoutly, and for long 
periods often, as in the case of Ryder. Work was 
for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and 
poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on 
canvas with great difficulty In the manner of a la- 
bourer. It seems obvious that his first drafts were 
always vivid with the life intended for them, but 
no one could possibly have suffered with the idea of 
how to complete a picture more than he. His lack 

71 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

of facility held him from spontaneity, as it is like- 
wise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in 
Fuller. 

They were artists in timidity, and had not the 
courage of physical force in painting. With them it 
was wholly a mental process. But we shall count 
them great for their purity of vision as well as for 
the sincerity and conviction that possessed them. 
Artistry of this sort will be welcomed anywhere, if 
only that we may take men seriously who profess 
seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated 
about sincerity, though I think conventional painters 
are not sure of that. It is not easy to think that men 
consent to repeat themselves from choice, and yet 
the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin 
and Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and 
artistic validity which places them out of association 
among men of their time or of today, in the field of 
objective and illustrative painters. We turn to them 
with pleasure after a journey through the museums, 
for their reticence let us say, and for the refinement 
of their vision, their beautiful gift of restraint. 
They emphasize the commonness of much that sur- 
rounds them, much that blatantly would obscure them 
If they were not pronouncedly superior. They would 
not be discounted to any considerable degree If they 
were placed among the known masters of landscape 
painters of all modern time. They would hold their 
own by the verity of feeling that Is In them, and what 
they might lose in technical excellence, would be com- 

72 



OUR IMAGINATIVES 

pensated for in uniqueness of personality. I should 
like well to see them placed beside artists like Maris 
and Marees, and even Courbet. It would surprise 
the casual appreciator much, I believe. 



73 



OUR IMPRESSIONISTS 

I HAVE for purely personal reasons chosen the two 
painters who formulate for me the conviction that 
there have been and are but two consistently con- 
vincing American Impressionists. These gentlemen 
are John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. 
I cannot say precisely in what year Twachtman died 
but for purposes Intended here this data is of no 
paramount consequence, save that it is always a 
matter of query as to just how long an artist must 
live, or have been dead, to be discovered in what 
is really his own time. 

John H. Twachtman as artist Is difficult to know 
even by artists; for his work is made difficult to see 
either by Its scarcity as determined for himself or 
by the exclusiveness of the owners of his pictures. 
It requires, however, but two or three of them to 
convince one that Twachtman has a something 
"plus" to contribute to his excursions Into impres- 
sionism. One feels that after a Duesseldorf black- 
ness which permeates his earlier work his conversion 
to impressionism was as fortunate as It was sincere. 
Twachtman knew, as is evidenced everywhere in his 
work, what he wished to essay and he proceeded with 
poetic reticence to give it forth. With a lyricism 
that is as convincing as it Is authentic, you feel that 

74 



OUR IMPRESSIONISTS 

there is a certain underlying spirit of resignation. 
He surely knew that a love of sunlight would save 
any man from pondering on the inflated importance 
of world issues. 

Having seen Twachtman but once my memory of 
his face recalls this admixture of emotion. He cared 
too much for the essential beauties to involve them 
with analyses extraneous to the meaning of beauty. 
That the Japanese did more for him than any other 
Orientals of whom he might have been thinking, is 
evident. For all that, his own personal lyricism 
surmounts his interest in outer interpretations of 
light and movement, and he leaves you with his own 
notion of a private and distinguished appreciation of 
nature. In this sense he leads one to Renoir's way 
of considering nature which was the pleasure in 
nature for itself. It was all too fine an adventure 
to quibble about. 

Twachtman's natural reticence and, I could also 
belieye, natural skepticism kept him from swinging 
wildly over to the then new theories, a gesture typical 
of less intelligent natures. He had the good sense 
to feel out for himself just where the new theories 
related to himself and set about producing flat sim- 
plicity of planes of color to produce a very dis- 
tinguished notion of light. He dispensed with the 
photographic attitude toward objectivity and yet at 
the same time held to the pleasing rhythmical shapes 
in nature. He did not resort to divisionalism or to 
ultra-violence of relationship. The pictures that I 

75 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

have seen such as "February", for Instance, in the 
Boston Museum, present for me the sensation of a 
man of great private spiritual and intellectual means, 
having the wish to express tactfully and convincingly 
his personal conclusions and reactions, leaning al- 
ways toward the side of iridescent illusiveness rather 
than emotional blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. 
His nuances are perhaps too finely adjusted to give 
forth the sense of overwhelming magic either in in- 
tention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with 
Twachtman with seldom or never a dramatic gesture. 
He is as illusive as a phrase of Mallarme and it will 
be remembered that he is of the period more or less 
of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. 
He does recall in essence at least the quality of 
pastels in prose, though the art intention is a sturdier 
one. It is enough that Twachtman did find his rela- 
tionship to impressionism, and that he did not evolve 
a system of repetition which marks the failure of all 
influence. 

Twachtman remains an artist of super-fine sensi- 
bility and distinction, and whatever he may have 
poured into the ears of students as an instructor left 
no visible haggard traces on his own production 
other than perhaps limiting that production. But 
we know that while the quality is valuable in respect 
of power it has no other precise value. We remem- 
ber that Giorgione perished likewise with an uncer- 
tain product to his credit, as to numbers, but he did 
leave his immemorial impression. So it is with John 

76 



OUR IMPRESSIONISTS 

H. Twachtman. He leaves his indelible influence 
among Americans as a fine artist, and he may be said 
to be among the few artists who, having taken up the 
impressionistic principle, found a way to express his 
personal ideas with a true degree of personal force. 
He is a beautifully sincere product and that is going 
far. Those pictures I have seen contain no taint 
of the market or clamoring for praise even. They 
were done because their author had an unobtrusive 
yet very aristocratic word to say, and the word was 
spoken with authority. John H. Twachtman must 
be counted as one of the genuine American artists, 
as well as among the most genuine artists of the 
world. If his pictures do not torment one with prob- 
lematic intellectualism, they do hold one with their 
inherent refinement of taste and a degree of aristo- 
cratic approach which his true intelligence implies. 

With the work of Theodore Robinson, there 
comes a wide divergence of feeling that is perhaps 
a greater comprehension of the principles of im- 
pressionism as applied to the realities involved in 
the academic principle. One is reminded of Bastien 
Le Page and Leon L'Hermitte, in the paintings of 
Robinson, as to their type of subject and the concep- 
tion of them also. That he lived not far from Giver- 
ney is likewise evident. Being of New England 
yankee extraction, a Vermonter I believe, he must 
have essayed always a sense of economy in emotion. 
No one could have gone so far as the then incredible 
Monet, whose pictures wear us to indifference with 

77 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

vapid and unprofitable thinking. What Monet did 
was to encourage a new type of audacity and a brand- 
new type in truth, when no one had up to then 
attempted to see nature as prismatical under the 
direct influence of the solar rays. All this has since 
been worked out with greater exactitude by the 
later theorists in modernism. 

While Van Gogh was slowly perishing of a mad 
ecstasy for light, covering up a natural Dutch realism 
with fierce attempts at prismatic relationship, always 
with the rhythms in a state of ecstatic ascendency; 
and Seurat had come upon the more satisfying poin- 
tillism as developed by himself; somewhere in amid 
all these extravagances men like Robinson were try- 
ing to combine orthodoxy of heritage and radicalist 
conversion with the new and very noble idea of im- 
pressionism. That Robinson succeeded in a not 
startling but nevertheless honorable and respectable 
fashion, must be conceded him. I sometimes think 
that VIgnon, a seemingly obscure associate of the 
impressionists, with a similar Impassioned feeling of 
realism, outdid him and approached closer to the 
principles as understood by Pissarro: probably bet- 
ter by a great deal than Monet himself, who is ac- 
credited with the honor of setting the theme moving 
in a modern line of that day. And Pissarro must 
have been a man to have so impressed all the men 
young and old of his time. After seeing a great 
number of Monet's one turns to any simple Pissarro 
for relief. And then there was also Sisley. 

78 



OUR IMPRESSIONISTS 

But the talk is of Theodore Robinson. He holds 
his place as a realist with hardly more than a realist's 
conception, subjoined to a really pleasing apprecia- 
tion of the principles of impressionism as imbibed by 
him from the source direct. Here are, then, the two 
true American impressionists, who, as far as I am 
aware, never slipped into the banalities of reiteration 
and marketable self-copy. They seem to have far 
more interest in private intellectual success than in a 
practical public one. It is this which helped them 
both, as it helps all serious artists, to keep their ideas 
clean of outward taint. This is one of the most im- 
portant factors, which gives a man a place in the art 
he essays to achieve. When the day of his work 
is at an end it will be seen by everyone precisely what 
the influences were that prompted his effort toward 
deliverance through creation. It is for the sake of 
this alone that sincere artists keep to certain prin- 
ciples, and with genuine sacrifice often, as was cer- 
tainly the case with Twachtman. And after all, how 
can a real artist be concerned as to just how salable 
his product is to be? Certainly not while he is 
working, if he be decent toward himself. This is of 
course heresy, with Wall Street so near. 



79 



ARTHUR B. DAVIES 

If Arthur B. Davies had found It necessary, as in 
the modern time it has been found necessary to 
separate literature from painting, we should doubt- 
less have had a very delicate and sensitive lyric 
poetry in book form. Titles for pictures like "Mir- 
rored Dreaming," "Sicily-Flowering Isle," "Shell of 
Gold," "A Portal of the Night," "Mystic Dalli- 
ance," are all of them creations of an essentially 
poetic and literary mind. They are all splendid 
titles for a real book of legendary experience. The 
poet will be first to feel the accuracy of lyrical emo- 
tion in these titles. The paintings lead one away 
entirely into the land of legend, into the iridescent 
splendor of reflection. They take one out of a 
world of didactic monotone, as to their artistic sig- 
nificance. They are essentially pictures created for 
the purpose of transportation. 

From the earlier days in that underground gallery 
on Fifth Avenue near Twenty-seventh Street to the 
present time, there has been a constantly flowing 
production of lyrical simplicity and purification. 
One can never think of Davies as one thinks of Cour- 
bet and of Cezanne, where the intention is first and 
last a technically esthetic one; especially in Cezanne, 
whose object was the removal of all significance from 

80 



ARTHUR B. DAVIES 

painting other than that of painting for itself. With 
Cezanne it was problem. One might even say it 
was the removal of personality. With Davies you 
are aware that it is an entirely intimate personal life 
he is presenting; a life entirely away from discussion, 
from all sense of problem; they are not problematic 
at all, his pictures; they have lyrical serenity as a 
basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of 
looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek 
world — a world of Platonic verities in calm relation 
with each other. It is essentially an art created from 
the principle of the harmonic law in nature, things in 
juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a 
poetic existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I 
have suggested. Arthur B. Davies is a lyric poet 
with a decidedly Celtic tendency. It is the smile of 
a radiant twilight in his brain. It is a country of 
green moon whispers and of shadowed movement. 
Imagination illuminating the moment of fancy with 
rhythmic persuasiveness. It is the Pandaean mys- 
tery unfolded with symphonic accompaniment. You 
have in these pictures the romances of the human 
mind made irresistible with melodic certainty. They 
are chansons sans paroles, sung to the syrinx in 
Sicilian glades. 

I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed 
into terms of classical metre. The color is mostly 
Greek, and the line is Greek. You could just as 
well hear Gliick as Keats ; you could just as well see 
the world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch 

8i 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

the smoke of old altars coiling among the cypress 
boughs. The redwoods of the West become columns 
of Doric eloquence and simplicity. The mountains 
and lakes of the West have become settings for the 
reading of the "Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. 
You see the reason for the titles chosen because you 
feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic accom- 
paniment of color is the primal essential. They are 
not so dynamic as suggestive in their quality of 
finality. The way is left open, in other words, for 
you yourself to wander, if you will, and possess the 
requisite instincts for poetry. 

The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversa- 
tion with him convince one that poetry and art are 
in no sense a diversion or a delusion even. They 
are an occupation, a real business for intelligent 
men and women. He is occupied with the essential 
qualities of poetry and painting. He is eclectic by 
instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his conviction 
through these unquestionable states of lyrical exist- 
ence. He is there when they happen. That is au- 
thenticity sufficient. They are not wandering moods. 
They are organized conditions and attitudes, intel- 
lectually appreciated and understood. He is a mys- 
tic only in the sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is 
mystic, since it strives for union with the universal 
soul in things. 

It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Ar- 
thur B. Davies, and that is so with all genuine ex- 
pression. You find this gift for conviction in power- 

8a. 



ARTHUR B. DA VIES 

ful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who 
are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined in- 
sistence upon the chosen esthetic principle. What- 
ever emanation, illusion, or "aura," dreadful word 
that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is 
only typical of what comes from all magical inten- 
tions, the magic of the world of not-being, made real 
through the operation of true fancy. Davies' pic- 
tures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction 
to the essays of the imagination such as those of 
William Blake. Poets like Davies are lookers-in. 
Poets like Blake are the austere residents of the 
country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less 
genuine. They merely "make" their world. It 
might be said they make the prosaic world over 
again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. 
This work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized 
in lyric metre. Davies feels the visionary life of 
facts as a scientist would feel them actually. He has 
the wish for absolute order and consistency. There 
is nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no 
lapses of rhetoric. It is, in its way, complete, one 
may say, since it is the intelligently contrived pur- 
pose of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute 
spiritual harmony. 

He is first of all the poet-painter in the sense that 
Albert Ryder is a painter for those with a fine com- 
prehension of the imagination. Precisely as Redon 
is an artist for artists, though not always their artist 
in convincing esthetics, he too, satisfies the instinct 

83 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

for legend, for transformation. Painters like Da- 
vies, Redon, Rops, Moreau, and the other mystical 
natures, give us rather the spiritual trend of their 
own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is un- 
touched by the foul breath of the world around them. 
In Rops and. Moreau you feel the imagination hurry- 
ing to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense of 
home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. 
In the work of Davies, and of Redon, there is the 
splendid silence of a world created by themselves, a 
world for the reflection of self. There is even a kind 
of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the illu- 
mined fact. 

Beauty recognizing herself with satisfaction — that 
seems to be the purpose of the work of Arthur B. 
Davies. It is so much outside the realm of scientific 
esthetics as hardly to have been more than over- 
heard. These pictures are efficiently exemplary of 
the axiom that "all art aspires to the condition of 
music." I could almost hear Davies saying that, as 
if Pater had never so much as thought of It. They 
literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the 
eye. They are illuminations for the manuscripts of 
the ascetic soul. They are windows for houses In 
which men and women may withdraw, and be recon- 
ciled to the doom of Isolation. 

With the arrival of Cubism into the modern es- 
thetic scene, there appeared a change in the manner 
of creation, though the same methods of invention 
remained chiefly without change. The result seems 

84 



ARTHUR B. DA VIES 

more In the nature of kaleidoscopic variance, a per- 
haps more acutely realized sense of opposites, than 
in the former mode. They register less completely, 
it seems to me, because the departure is too sudden 
in the rhythmus of the artist. The art of Davies 
is the art of a melodious curved line. Therefore the 
sudden angularity is abrupt to an appreciative eye. 

It is the poetry of Arthur B. Davies that comes 
to the fore in one's appreciation. He has the almost 
impeccable gift for lyrical truth, and the music of 
motion is crystallized in his imagination to a master- 
ful degree. He is the highly sensitized illustrator 
appointed by the states of his soul to picture forth 
the pauses of the journey through the realm of 
fancy. It has in It the passion of violet and silver 
dreaming, the hue of an endless dawn before the day 
descends upon the world. You expect the lute to 
regain its jaded tune there. You expect the harp to 
reverberate once again with the old fervors. You 
expect tne syrinx to unfold the story of the reed In 
light song. It contains the history of all the hushed 
horizons that can be found over the edges of a world 
of materiality. It holds In It always the warm soul 
of every digit of the moon. Human passion Is for 
once removed, unless It be that the mere humanism 
of motion excites the sense of passion. You are 
made to feel the non-essentiality of the stress of the 
flesh in the true places of spiritual existence. The 
life of moments is carried over and made permanent 
in fancy, and they endure by the purity of their 

85 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

presence alone. There is no violence in the work of 
Davies. It is the appreciable relation of harmony 
and counterpoint in the human heart and mind. It is 
the logic of rhythmical equation felt there, almost 
exclusively. It is the condition of music that art 
in the lyrical state has seemed to suggest. 

The artistic versatility of Davies is too familiar 
to comment upon. He has no distress with mediums. 
His exceptional sensitivity to substance and texture 
gives him the requisite rapport with all species of 
mediums to which the artist has access. One might 
be inclined to think of him as a virtuoso in pastel 
possibly, and his paintings in the medium of oil sug- 
gest this sort of richness. He is nevertheless at 
home in all ways. All these are issues waved away 
to my mind, in view of his acute leaning to the poet 
that leads the artist away from problems other than 
that of Greek rhythmical perfection. It is essen- 
tially a Platonic expression, the desire of the perfect 
union of one thing with another. That is its final 
consummation, so it seems to me. 



86 



REX SLINKARD 

"I doubt not that the passionately wept deaths of young men 
are provided for." — Walt Whitman. 

We have had our time for regretting the loss of 
men of genius during the war. We know the sig- 
nificance of the names of Rupert Brooke, Edward 
Thomas, Elroy Flecker on the other side of the sea, 
to the hope of England. And on this side of the 
sea the names of Joyce Kilmer, Alan Seeger and 
Victor Chapman have been called out to us for the 
poetic spell they cast upon America. All of them 
in their manful, poetic way. They were all of them 
poets in words; all but Victor Chapman were pro- 
fessional poets, and he, even if he himself was not 
aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his 
letters. There are others almost nameless among 
soldier-hero people who gave us likewise real bits of 
unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters. 

Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by in- 
clination, and ranchman as to specific occupation. 
Rex has gone from us, too. How many are there 
who know, or could have known, the magic of this 
unassuming visionary person. Only a few of us 
who understand the meaning of magic and the mean- 
ing of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of 
America that there remain with us numbers of highly 

87 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

indicative drawings and a group of rare canvases, 
the quality of which painters will at once acclaim, 
and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of, 
paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have 
in point of purity of conception and feeling for the 
subtle shades of existence, those rare states of life 
which, when they arrive, are called perfect moments 
in the poetic experience of men and women. 

There will be no argument to offer or to maintain 
regarding the work of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, 
the perfect evidence that one of the finest lyric talents 
to be found among the young creators of America 
has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would 
like to have done, as it so eagerly and surely was 
already doing. Rex Slinkard was a genius of first 
quality. The word genius may be used these days 
without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who 
has evolved for himself a clear vision of life may be 
said to possess the quality of genius. 

"The day's work done and the supper past. I 
walk through the horse-lot and to my shack. In- 
side I light the lantern, and then the fire, and sitting, 
I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the 
world, my home." 

These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, 
and the marginalia written upon the edges of many 
of his drawings, show the varying degrees of deli- 
cacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent 
for his own realization. His thought was once and 
for all upon the realities, that is, those substances 



REX SLINKARD 

that are or can be realities only to the artist, the poet, 
and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard was all of 
these. His observation of himself, and his under- 
standing of himself, were uncommonly genuine in 
this young and so poetic painter. He had learned 
early for so young a man what were his special ideal- 
istic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for 
refinements, and was working continually toward 
the rarer states of being out from the emotional into 
the intellectual, through spiritual application into the 
proper and requisite calm. He lived in a thoroughly 
ordered world of specified experience which is typi- 
fied in his predilection for the superiority of Chir\ese 
notions of beauty over the more sentimental rhythms 
of the Greeks. He had found the proper shade of 
intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental 
expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality 
that gave him more than the platonic. He was search- 
ing for a majesty beyond sensuousness, by which 
sensuous experience is transformed into greater and 
more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the 
very life of beauty to take the place of sensuous sug- 
gestion. Realities in place of semblances, then, he 
was eager for, but the true visionary realities as far 
finer than the materialistic reality. 

He had learned early that he was not, and never 
would be, the fantasist that some of his earlier can- 
vases indicate. Even his essays in portraiture, verg- 
ing on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more toward 
the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with 

89 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

clarity, the fine line of decision between imagination 
and vision, between the dramatic and the lyric, and 
had realized completely the supremacy of the lyric 
in himself. He was a young boy of light walking 
on a man's strong feet upon real earth over which 
there was no shadow for him. He walked straight- 
forwardly toward the elysium of his own very per- 
sonal organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were 
"young rivers" for him, rivers of being, across which 
white youths upon white horses, and white fawns 
were gliding to the measure of their own delights. 
He had, this young boy of light, the perfect measure 
of poetic accuracy coupled with a man's fine sim- 
plicity in him. He had the priceless calm for the un- 
derstanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted 
upon him gently with their own bright pressure. He 
let them thrive according to their own relationships 
to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and soul 
of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern 
rapture for permanent things such as is to be found 
in "L'apres midi d'un Faun" of Mallarme and De- 
bussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter pro- 
portions of experience. It was radiance and sim- 
plicity immingled in his sense of things. 

He would have served his country well as one of 
its clearest and best citizens, far more impressively 
by the growth and expansion of his soul in his own 
manly vision, than by the questionable value of his 
labors in the military service. He did what he could, 
gladly and heroically, but he had become too weak- 

90 



REX SLINKARD 

ened by the siege of physical reverses that pursued 
his otherwise strong body to endure the strain of 
labor he performed, or wanted to accomplish. He 
knew long before he entered service the significance 
of discipline from very profound experience with 
life from childhood onward. Life had come to him 
voluminously because he was one who attracted life 
to him, electrically. He did not "whine" or "post- 
pone," for he was in all of his hours at least mentally 
and spiritually equal to the world in all of its aspects. 
He was physically not there for the thing he volun- 
teered to do, despite the appearance of manly 
strength in him, or thought he would be able to do. 
He hoped strongly to serve. None knew his secret 
so well as himself, and he kept his own secret royally 
and amicably. 

Exceptional maturity of understanding of life, of 
nature, and all the little mysteries that are the shape 
of human moments, was conspicuously evidenced for 
as long as his intimates remember. The extraordi- 
nary measure of calm contained in his last pictures 
and in so many of the drawings done in moments 
of rest in camp is evidence of all this. He had a 
boy's brightness and certainty of the fairness of 
things, joined with a man's mastery of the simple 
problem. He was a true executive in material affairs 
and his vision was another part of the business of 
existence. 

As I have said. Rex Slinkard had the priceless 
poise of the true lyric poet, and it was the ordered 

91 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

system in his vision that proved him. He knew 
the value of his attitudes and he was certain that 
perfection is imperishable, and strove with a poet's 
calm intensity toward that. He had found his 
Egypt, his Assyria, his Greece, and his own specific 
Nirvana at his feet everywhere. 

As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation 
and the ripening of the alfalfa crops, he spent the 
moments otherwise lost in carving pebbles he found 
about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of 
his own face or body which he knew well, or the 
grace of other bodies and faces he had seen. He 
was always the young eye on things, an avid eye sure 
of the wonder about to escape from every living 
thing where light or shadow fell upon them gently. 
He was a sure, unquestionable, and in this sense a 
perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable painter's 
gift for presentation. 

He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of 
whom he had never heard, in his feeling for the 
almost occult presence emanating from everything 
he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters 
to his friends hold touches of the same beauty his 
drawings and paintings and carvings on pebbles 
contain. 

A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his 
soul, a boy of light in quest of the real wisdom 
that is necessary for the lyrical embodiment, this 
was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and poet- 
painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth 

.92 



REX SLINKARD 

and of the world, my home." This might have been 
a marginal note from the Book of Thel, or it might 
have been a line from some new songs of innocence 
and experience. It might have been spoken from 
out of one of the oaks of William Blake. It must 
have been heard from among the live oaks of Saugus. 
It was the simple speech of a ranchman of Cali- 
fornia, a real boy-man who loved everything with a 
poet's love because everything that lived, lived for 
him. 

Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who 
would like to have remained in the presence of his 
friends, the inhabitants of the earth, to have lived 
long in the world, his home. 

It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of 
youth, perhaps the only certainty there can be. He 
was the calm declaimer of the life of everlasting 
beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" 
that is everywhere at all times, and in all places, for 
the poet's and the visionary's eye at least. He was 
sure of what he saw; his paintings and drawings are 
a firm conviction of that. Like all who express 
themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to 
say. At thirty he had achieved expression remark- 
ably. He had found the way out, and the way out 
was toward and into the light. He was clear, and 
entirely unshadowed. 

This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and 
man of the living world. Since he could not remain, 
he has left us a carte visite of rarest clarity and 

93 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

beauty. We who care, among the few, for things 
in relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived 
and laughed and wondered, and remained the little 
while. The new silence is but a phase of the same 
living one he covered all things with. He was glad 
he was here. He was another angle of light on the 
poetic world around us, another unsuspected facet 
of the bright surface of the world. Surfaces were 
for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a 
fresh vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to 
decorate and to decorate consistently. His sense of 
decoration was fluid and had no hint of the rhetorical 
in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to 
shape, by the harmonic insistence in life and in 
nature. A flower held a face, and a face held a 
flowery substance for him. Bodies were young trees 
in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. 
The body of the man, the body of the woman, beauti- 
ful male and female bodies, the ideal forms of every- 
one and everything he encountered, he understood 
and made his own. They were all living radiances 
against the dropped curtain of the world. He loved 
the light on flesh, and the shadows on strong arms, 
legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philo- 
sophic or esthetic. He had traveled through the 
ages of culture in his imagination, and was convinced 
that nothing was new and nothing was old. It was 
all living and eternal when it was genuine. He 
stepped out of the world of visible realities but 
seldom, and so it was, books and methods of in- 

94 



REX SLINKARD 

terpretation held little for him. He didn't need 
them, for he held the whole world in his arms 
through the power of dream and vision. He touched 
life everywhere, touched it with himself. 

Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm 
October i8, 191 8, in St. Vincent's Hospital, New 
York City. It is the few among those of us who 
knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish 
earnestly that Rex might have remained. He gave 
much that many wanted, or would have wanted if 
they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The 
pictures and drawings that remain are the testimony 
of his splendid poetic talents. He was a lyrical 
painter of the first order. He is something that we 
miss mightily, and shall miss for long. 



95 



SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS 

With the arrival of Cezanne into the field of 
water-color painting, this medium suffers a new and 
drastic instance for comparison. It is not technical 
audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these 
brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form 
as well as radiant with light. It is not the kind of 
virility for its own sake that is typical of our own 
American artists so gifted in this special medium, 
like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge 
Macknight, John Marin, and Charles Demuth. 
With Cezanne it was merely a new instrument to 
employ for the realization of finer plastic relations. 
The medium of water-color has been ably employed 
by the English and the Dutch painters, but it seems 
as if the artists of both these countries succeeded in 
removing all the brilliance and charm as well as 
the freshness which is peculiar to it; few outside 
of Cezanne have, I think, done more with water- 
color than the above named American artists, none 
who have kept more closely and consistently within 
the confines and peculiarities of this medium. 

In the consideration of the American water-color 
artists it will be found that Sargent and Homer tend 
always toward the graphic aspect of a pictorial idea, 
yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this 

96 



SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS 

obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium 
for its own sake. Homer steps out of the dry con- 
ventionalism of the English style of painting, which 
Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harsh- 
ness which is found in the oil pictures of Homer is 
relieved in the water-colors and there is added to this 
their extreme virtuosity, and a great distinction to 
be discovered in their sense of light and life, the 
sense of the object illumined with a wealth of 
vibrancy that is peculiar to its environment, par- 
ticularly noticeable in the Florida series. 

Dodge Macknight has seen with a keen eye the 
importance of this virility of technique to be found 
in Homer, and has added to this a passion for im- 
pressionistic veracity which heightens his own work 
to a point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one 
might almost say above Winslow Homer. Mack- 
night really did authenticate for himself the efficacy 
of impression with almost incredible feats of visual 
bravery. There is no array of pigment sufficient to 
satisfy him as for what heat and cold do to his sensi- 
bility, as experienced by the opposite poles of a New 
England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. 
He is always in search of the highest height in con- 
trasts, all this joined by what his sense of fierceness 
of light could bring to the fantastic dune stretches of 
Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color 
has the convincing charm of almost fanaticism for 
itself; and we find this medium progressing still 
further with the fearlessness of John Marin in the 

97 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

absolute at-home-ness which he displays on all occa- 
sions in his audacious water-color pictures. 

Marin brings you to the feeling that digression is 
for him imperative only as affording him relief from 
the tradition of his medium. John Marin employs 
all the restrictions of water-color with the wisdom 
that is necessary in the case. He says that paper 
plus water, plus emotion will give a result in them- 
selves and proceeds with the idea at hand in what 
may without the least temerity be called a masterly 
fashion; he has run the gamut of experience with 
his materials from the earliest Turner tonalities, 
through Whisterian vagaries on to American definite- 
ness, and has incidentally noted that the Chinese have 
been probably the only supreme masters of the wash 
in the history of water-color painting. I can say for 
myself that Marin produces the liveliest, handsomest 
wash that is producible or that has ever been ac- 
complished in the field of water-color painting. Per- 
haps many of the pictures of John Marin were not 
always satisfying in the tactile sense because many 
of them are taken up with an inevitable passion for 
technical virtuosity, which is no mean distinction in 
itself but we are not satisfied as once we were with 
this passion for audacity and virtuosity. We have 
learned that spatial existence and spatial relation- 
ships are the important essentials in any work of 
art. The precise ratio of thought accompanied by 
exactitude of emotion for the given idea is a matter 
of serious consideration with the modern artists of 

98 



SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS 

today. That Is the special value of modern painting 
to the development of art. 

The Chinese really knew just what a wash was 
capable of, and confined themselves to the majesty 
of the limitations at hand. John Marin has been 
wise in this also though he is not precisely fanatical, 
which may be his chief defect, and it is probably 
true that the greatest experimenters have shown 
fanatical tendency, which is only the accentuated 
spirit of obsession for an idea. How else does one 
hold a vision? It is the only way for an artist to 
produce plastic exactitude between two planes of 
sensation or thought. The parts must be as perfect 
as the whole and In the best art this is so. There 
must be the sense of "existence" everywhere and it 
might even be said that the cool hue of the intellect is 
the first premise in a true work of art. Virtuosity 
Is a state of expression but it is not the final state. 
One must search for as well as find the sequential 
quality which is. necessitated for the safe arrival of 
a work of art Into the sphere of esthetic existence. 

The water-colors of John Marin are restless with 
energy, which is In Its way a real virtue. They do, 
I think, require, at times at least, more of the calm 
of research and less of the excitement of it. All 
true artistry is self-contained and never relies upon 
outer physical stimulus or inward extravagance of 
phantasy, or of idiosyncrasy. A work of art is never 
peculiar, it Is always a natural thing. In this sense 

99 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

John Marin approaches real art because he is prob- 
ably the most natural water-colorist in existence. 

With Charles Demuth water-color painting steps 
up into the true condition of ideas followed by ex- 
perience. He has joined with modernism most con- 
sistently, having arrived at this state of progression 
by the process of investigation. The tradition of 
water-color painting takes a jump into the new field 
of modernism, and Demuth has given us his knowl- 
edge of the difference between illustration, depiction, 
and the plastic realization of fact. Probably no 
young artist has accomplished a finer degree of ar- 
tistic finesse in illustration than has Charles Demuth 
in his series of illustrations for "The Two Magics" 
of Henry James, or more explicitly to say "The 
Turn of the Screw". These pictures are to the true 
observer all that could be hoped for in imaginative 
sincerity as well as in technical elusiveness. Demuth 
has since that time stepped out of the confinement 
of water-color pure, over into the field of tempera, 
which brings it nearer to the sturdier mediums em- 
ployed in the making of pictures evolving a greater 
severity of form and a commendable rigidity of line. 
He has learned like so many moderns that the ruled 
line offers greater advantages in pictorial structure. 
You shall find his approach to the spirit of Christo- 
pher Wren is as clear and direct as his feeling for 
the vastiness of New England speechlessness. He 
has come up beyond the dramatisation of emotion to 
the point of expression for its own sake. But he is 

100 



SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS 

nevertheless to be included among the arrived water- 
colorists, because his gifts for expression have been 
evolved almost entirely through this medium. There 
is then a fine American achievement in the art of 
water-color painting which may safely be called at 
this time a localized tradition. It has become an 
American realization. 



roi 



THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem 
upon our modern artistic horizon. The idea of 
photography as an art has been discussed no doubt 
ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, 
I have always said for myself that the kodak offers 
me the best substitute for the picture of life, that I 
have found. I find the snapshot, almost without ex- 
ception, holding my interest for what it contains of 
simple registration of and adherence to facts for 
themselves. I have had a very definite and plausible 
aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and we 
have had more than a surfeit of this sort of pro- 
duction for the past ten or fifteen years. I have re- 
ferred frequently in my mind to the convincing por- 
traits by David Octavius Hill as being among the 
first examples of photographic portraiture to hold 
my own private interest as clear and unmanipulated 
expressions of reality; and it is a definite as well as 
irresistible quality that pervades these mechanical 
productions, the charm of the object for its own sake. 

It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in pho- 
tography that did so much to destroy the vital sig- 
nificance of photography as a type of expression 
which may be classed as among the real arts of to- 
day. And it was a movement that failed because it 

102 



THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

added nothing to the idea save a distressing super- 
ficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain, that was 
as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring 
intensely for precision of form and accuracy of 
presentation. Photography was in this sense un- 
fortunate in that it fell into the hands of adepts at 
the brush who sought to introduce technical varia- 
tions which had nothing in reality to do with it and 
with which It never could have anything in common. 
All this sort of thing was produced in the age of the 
famous men and women, the period of eighteen 
ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it 
was the age when the smart young photographer 
was frantic to produce famous sitters like Shaw and 
Rodin. We do not care anything about such things 
in our time because we now know that anybody well 
photographed according to the scope as well as the 
restrictions of the medium at hand could be, as has 
been proven, an interesting subject. 

It has been seen, as Alfred Stieglitz has so clearly 
shown, that an eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, 
a breast, a hand, any part being equal to the whole 
in its power to tell the story, could be made as 
interesting, more so indeed than all the famous 
people in existence. It doesn't matter to us in the 
least that Morgan and Richard Strauss helped fill a 
folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons. 
All this was, of course, In keeping with the theatri- 
cism of the period in which it was produced, which is 
one of the best things to be said of it. But we do 

103 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

know that Whistler helped ruin photography along 
with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone 
has his office nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred 
Stieglitz was told by the prevailing geniuses of that 
time that he was a back number because of his strict 
adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, be- 
cause he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the 
strictly technical advantages it offered, and it was 
not therefore a fashionable addition to the kind of 
thing that was being done by the assuming ones at 
that time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred 
Stieglitz In March, 192 1, at the Anderson Galleries, 
New York, was a huge revelation even to those of 
us who along with our own ultra modern interests 
had found a place for good unadulterated photog- 
raphy in the scheme of our appreciation of the art 
production of this time. 

I can say without a qualm that photography has 
always been a real stimulus to me in all the years I 
have been personally associated with it through the 
various exhibitions held along with those of modern 
painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or 
more intimately understood as "291", Photography 
was an interesting foil to the kind of veracity that 
painting is supposed to express, or rather to say, was 
then supposed to express; for painting like all other 
ideas has changed vastly In the last ten years, and 
even very much since the interval created by the 
war. I might have learned this anywhere else, but I 
did get It from the Stieglitz camera realizations with 

104 



THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

more than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am 
willing to assert now that there are no portraits in 
existence, not in all the history of portrait realiza- 
tion either by the camera or in painting, which so 
definitely present, and in many instances with an 
almost haunting clairvoyance, the actualities existing 
in the sitter's mind and body and soul. These por- 
traits are for me without parallel therefore in this 
particular. And I make bold with another assertion, 
that from our modern point of view the Stieglitz 
photographs are undeniable works of art, as are 
also the fine photographs of the younger men like 
Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being 
also one of our best modern painters, has probably 
added to his photographic work a different type of 
sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called 
creative medium of painting. It is, as we know, 
brain matter that counts in a work of art, and we 
have dispensed once and for all with the silly notion 
that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and 
last of all, a product of the intelligence. 

I think the photographers must at least have been 
a trifle upset with this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know 
that many of the painters of the day were noticeably 
impressed. There was much to concern everyone 
there, in any degree that can be put upon us as in- 
terested spectators. For myself, I care nothing for 
the gift of interpretation, and far less for that 
dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind 
of hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles 

105 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

the eye with a trickery, and produces upon the un- 
trained and uncritical mind a kind of unintelligent 
hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific 
comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand 
or the old-fashioned manipulation of a brush or a 
tool. I am interested in presentation pure and 
simple. All things that are living are expression 
and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. 
Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive 
symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of 
view, useless art. Anyone who understands life 
needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell 
him what it is. When a picture looks like the life 
of the world, it is apt to be a fair picture or a 
good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad 
picture and it is bound to become worse as we think 
of it. And so for my own pleasure I have consulted 
the kodak as furnishing me with a better picture of 
life than many pictures I have seen by many of the 
so-called very good artists, and I have always de- 
lighted in the rotograph series of the Sunday papers 
because they are as close to life as any superficial 
representation can hope to be. 

It was obvious then that many of those who saw 
the Stieglitz photographs, and there were large 
crowds of them, were non-plussed by the unmistak- 
able authenticity of experience contained in them. 
If you stopped there you were of course mystified, 
but there is no mystery whatever in these produc- 
tions, for they are as clear and I shall even go so far 

io6 



THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

as to say as objective as the daylight which produced 
them, and aside from certain intimate issues they are 
impersonal as it is possible for an artist to be. It 
is this quality in them which makes them live for 
me as realities in the art world of modern time. 
All art calls for one variety of audacity or another 
and so these photographs unfold one type of audacity 
which IS not common among works of art, excepting 
of course in highly accentuated instances of auto- 
graphic revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy 
with all the subjects on exhibition which is revealed 
in these photographs: A kind of spiritual diagnosis 
which is seldom or never to be found among the 
photographers and almost never among the painters 
of the conventional portrait. This ability, talent, 
virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it, 
is without theatricism and therefore without spec- 
tacular demonstration either of the sitter or the 
method employed in rendering them. 

It is never a matter of arranging cheap and prac- 
tically unrelated externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I 
am confident it can be said that he has never in his 
life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity 
runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far 
closer to the clairvoyant exposure of the psychic 
aspects of the moment, as contained in either the 
persons or the objects treated of. With these essays 
in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series 
of types who had but one object in mind, to lend 
themselves for the use of the machine in order that 

107 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

a certain problem might be accurately rendered with 
the scientific end of the process in view, and the 
given actuality brought to the surface when possible. 
I see nothing in these portraits beyond this. I un- 
derstand them technically very little only that I am 
aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, 
seen plates that hold such depths of tonal value and 
structural relationship of light and shade as are 
contained in the hundred and fifty prints on ex- 
hibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly 
new problem and this is the first thing which must 
be learned. Precisely as we learn that a certain 
type of painting ended in the history of the world 
with Cezanne. 

There is an impulse now in painting toward pho- 
tographic veracity of experience as is so much in 
evidence in the work of an artist of such fine percep- 
tions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old- 
fashioned notions of what constitutes artistic experi- 
ence. There is a deliberate revolt, and photography 
as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz and the 
few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part 
of the new esthetic anarchism which we as younger 
painters must expect to make ourselves responsible 
for. It must be remembered you know, that there 
has been a war, and art is in a condition of encourag- 
ing and stimulating renascence, and we may even go 
so far as to say that it is a greater world issue than 
it was previous to the great catastrophe. And also, 
it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned 

108 



THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

the end of the world has been seen. The true artist, 
if he is intelligent, is witness of this most stimulating 
truth that confronts us. We cannot hope to function 
esthetically as we did before all this happened, be- 
cause we are not the same beings intellectually. 
This does not mean in relation to photography that 
all straight photography is good. It merely means 
that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth 
Avenue" art, is a conspicuous species of artistic 
bunkum, and must be recognized as such. 

Photographers must know that fogging and 
blurring the image is curtailing the experience of it. 
It is a foolish notion that mystification is of any 
v^alue. Flattery is one of the false elements that 
enter into the making of a work of art among the 
artists of doubtful integrity, but this is often if 
not always the commercial element that enters into 
it. There is a vast difference between this sort of 
representation and that which is to be found in 
Greek sculpture which is nothing short of conscious 
plastic organization. These figures were set up in 
terms of the prevailing systems of proportion. Por- 
traits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry 
of the painter in matters of decoration for the great 
halls of the periods in which they were hung. They 
were studies on a large scale of ornamentation. 
Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In 
these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his fol- 
lowers there is an engaging directness which cannot 
be and must not be ignored. They do for once 

109 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly 
of course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the 
sitter without pose or theatricism of any sort, a 
rather rare thing to be said of the modern photo- 
graph. 

Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more 
years of experimentation comes up among the mod- 
erns by virtue of his own personal attitude toward 
photography, and toward his, as well as its, relation 
to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability 
to diagnose the character and quality of the sitter 
as being peculiar to itself, as a being in relation to 
itself seen by his own clarifying insight into general 
and well as special character and characteristic. It 
need hardly be said that he knows his business tech- 
nically for he has been acclaimed sufficiently all over 
the world by a series of almost irrelevant medals and 
honours without end. The Stieglitz exhibition is 
one that should have been seen by everyone regard- 
less of any peculiar and special predilection for art. 
These photos will have opened the eye and the mind 
of many a sleeping one as to what can be done by 
way of mechanical device to approach the direct 
charm of life in nature. 

The moderns have long since congratulated Alfred 
Stieglitz for his originality in the special field of his 
own creative endeavor. It will matter little whether 
the ancients do or not. His product is a fine testi- 
monial to his time and therefore this is his con- 
tribution to his time. He finds himself, and perhaps 

no 



THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

to his own embarrassment even, among the best 
modern artists; for Stieglitz as I understand him 
cares little for anything beyond the rendering of the 
problem Involved which makes him of course scien- 
tific first and whatever else afterward, which is the 
hope of the modern artists of all movements, regard- 
less. Incidentally it may be confided he is an artistic 
Idol of the Dadaists which is at least a happy indi- 
cation of his modernism. If he were to shift his 
activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for 
his actual value as modern artist expressing present 
day notions of actual things. Perhaps he will not 
care to be called Dada, but it is nevertheless true. 
He has ridden his own vivacious hobbyhorse with as 
much liberty, and one may even say license, as is 
possible for one intelligent human being. There is 
no space to tell casually of his various aspects such 
as champion billiard player, racehorse enthusiast, 
etcetera. This information would please his dada- 
Istlc confreres, if no one else shows signs of interest. 



Ill 



SOME WOMEN ARTISTS IN MODERN 
PAINTING 

It is for the purpose of specialization that the 
term woman is herewith applied to the idea of art 
in painting. Art is for anyone naturally who can 
show degree of mastery in it. There have been a 
great many women poets and musicians as well aj 
actors, though singularly enough the women painters 
of history have been few, and for that matter in 
question of proportion remain so. Whatever the 
wish may be in point of dismissing the idea of sex in 
painting, there has so often been felt among many 
women engaging to express themselves in it, the 
need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and 
even brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must 
be said here, a factitious notion of power. Power. in 
painting does not come from muscularity of arm; it 
comes naturally from the intellect. There are a 
great many male painters showing too many signs 
of femininity in their appreciation and the concep- 
tion of art in painting. Art is neither male nor 
female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women 
artists such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the 
charm of their own feminine perceptions and fem- 
inine powers of expression. It is their very fem- 
ininity which makes them distinctive in these in- 

112 



SOME WOMEN ARTISTS 

stances. This does not Imply lady-like approach or 
womanly attitude of moral. It merely means that 
their quality is a feminine quality. 

In the work of Madame Delaunay Terek, who is 
the wife of Delaunay, the French Orphiste, which I 
have not seen since the war came on, one can say 
that she was then running her husband a very close 
second for distinction in painting and intelligence of 
expression. When two people work so closely in 
harmony with each other, it is and will always re- 
main a matter of difficulty in knowing just who is the 
real expressor of an idea. Whatever there is of 
originality in the idea of Orphisme shall be credited 
to Delaunay as the inventor, but whether his own 
examples are more replete than those of Mme. 
Delaunay Terek is not easy of statement. There 
was at that time a marked increase of virility in 
production over those of Delaunay himself, but these 
are matters of private personal attack. Her Russian 
temper was probably responsible for this, at least 
no doubt, assisted considerably. There was never- 
theless at that time marked evidence that she was in 
mastery of the idea of Orphisme both as to concep- 
tion and execution. She showed greater signs of 
virility in her approach than did Delaunay himself. 
There was in his work a deal of what Gertrude Stein 
then called "white wind", a kind of thin escaping 
in the method. The designs did not lock so keenly. 
His work had always typical charm if it had not 
always satisfying vigor. His "Tour Eiffel" and t, 

113 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

canvas called "Rugby" I think, I remember as hav- 
ing more grace than depth, but one may say never- 
theless, real distinction. 

In the exchanging of ideas so intimately as has 
happened splendidly between Picasso and Braque, 
which is in the nature of professional dignity among 
artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion 
even to the highly perceptive artist and this must 
therefore confuse the casual observer and layman. 
So it is, or was at that time with the painting of 
Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terek; what 
you learned in this instance was that the more vigor- 
ous of the pictures were hers. She showed the same 
strength and style in her work as in her interesting 
personality which was convincing without being too 
strained or forced; she was most probably an aver- 
age Russian woman which as one knows means a 
great deal as to intelligence and personal power. 

MARIE LAURENCIN 

With Marie Laurencin there was a greater sense 
of personal and individual creation. One can never 
quite think of anyone in connection with her pictures 
other than the happy reminiscence of Watteau. With 
her work comes charm in the highest, finest sense; 
there is nothing trivial about her pictures, yet they 
abound in all the graces of the i8th Century. Her 
drawings and paintings with spread fans and now 
and then a greyhound or a gazelle opposed against 
them in design, hold grace and elegance of feeling 

114 



SOME WOMEN ARTISTS 

that Watteau would certainly have sanctioned. She 
brings up the same sense of exquisite gesture and 
simplicity of movement with a feeling for the ro- 
mantic aspect of virginal life which exists nowhere 
else In modern painting. She eliminates all severities 
of intellect, and super-Imposes wistful charm of idea 
upon a pattern of the most delicate beauty. She is 
essentially an original which means that she invents 
her own experience in art. 

Marie Laurencin concerns herself chiefly with the 
idea of girlish youth, young girls gazing toward each 
other with fans spread or folded, and fine braids of 
hair tied gently with pale cerise or pale blue ribbon, 
and a pearl-like hush of quietude hovers over them. 
She arrests the attention by her fine reticence and 
holds one's Interest by the veracity of esthetic experi- 
ence she evinces in her least or greatest painting or 
drawing. She paints with miniature sensibility and 
knows best of all what to leave out. She is eminently 
devoid of excesslveness either in pose or in treat- 
ment, with the result that your eye Is refreshingly 
cooled with the delicate process. 

That Marie Laurencin keeps in the grace of 
French children is in no way surprising if you know 
the incomparable loveliness of them. Apart from 
her modernistic excellence as artist, she conveys a 
poetry so essentially French in quality that you wish 
always for more and more of It. It is the light 
breath of the Luxembourg gardens and the gardens 
of the Tulllerles coming over you once more and 

115 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

the same grace in child-life as existed in the costly 
games at Versailles among the grown-ups depicted 
so superbly by Watteau and his most worthy follow? 
ers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath 
than movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aris- 
tocratic creation Marie Laurencin produces for us, 
one that makes the eye avid of more experience and 
the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially 
beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern 
painting, this nacreous cubism of Marie Laurencin. 

GEORGIA o'kEEFFE * 

With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into 
volcanic crateral ethers, and sees the world of a 
woman turned inside out and gaping with deep open 
eyes and fixed mouth at the rather trivial world of 
living people. "I wish people were all trees and I 
think I could enjoy them then," says Georgia 
O'Keeffe. Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet 
scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experi- 
ence ; she has walked on fire and listened to the hiss- 
ing of vapors round her person. The pictures of 
O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, 
are probably as living and shameless private docu- 
ments as exist, in painting certainly, and probably 
in any other art. By shamelessness I mean unquali- 
fied nakedness of statement. Her pictures are es- 
sential abstractions as all her sensations have been 
tempered to abstraction by the too vicarious experi- 
* American. — Ed. 

ii6 



SOME WOMEN ARTISTS 

ence with actual life. She had seen hell, one might 
say, and is the Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a 
secret. She looks as if she had ridden the millions 
of miles of her every known imaginary horizon, 
and has left all her horses lying dead in their tracks. 
All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater 
sense of truth. What these quests for truth are 
worth no one can precisely say, but the tendency 
would be to say at least by one who has gone far to 
find them out that they are not worthy of the earth 
or sky they are written on. Truth has soiled many 
an avenue, it has left many a drawing room window 
open. It has left the confession box filled with 
bones. However, Georgia O'Keeffe pictures are 
essays in experience that neither Rops nor Moreau 
nor Baudelaire could have smiled away. 

She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life 
as experience than she could ever be to that of 
Catherine the Great or Lucrezia Borgia. Georgia 
O'Keeffe wears no poisoned emeralds. She wears 
too much white; she is impaled with a white con- 
sciousness. It is not without significance that she 
wishes to paint red in white and still have it look 
like red. She thinks it can be done and yet there 
is more red in her pictures than any other color at 
present; though they do, it must be said, run to rose 
from ashy white with oppositions of blue to keep 
them companionable and calm. The work of 
Georgia O'Keeffe startles by its actual experience in 
life. This does not imply street life or sky life or 

117 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

drawing room life, but life in all its huge abstrac- 
tion of pain and misery and its huge propensity for 
silencing the spirit of adventure. These pictures 
might also be called expositions of psychism in color 
and movement. 

Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe 
would not wish the company of more tangible things 
than trees. She knows why she despises existence, 
and it comes from facing the acute dilemma with 
more acuteness than it could comprehend. She is 
vastly over-size as to experience in the spiritual 
geometric of the world. All this gives her painting 
as clean an appearance as it is possible to Imagine in 
painting. She soils nothing with cheap indulgence 
of wishing commonplace things. She has wished too 
large and finds the world altogether too small in 
comparison. 

What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as 
artist depends upon herself. She is modern by in- 
stinct and therefore cannot avoid modernity of ex- 
pression. It is not willed, it is Inevitable. When 
she looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia 
that radiate from them and It is by this that she 
gauges her loves and hates or her tolerance of them. 
It is enough that her pictures arrive with a strange 
incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an 
import, does not disconcert by this insistence. She 
knows the psychism of patterns and evolves them 
with strict regard for the pictural aspects in them 
which save them from banality as ideas. She has 

Ii8 



SOME WOMEN ARTISTS 

no preachment to offer and utters no rubbish on 
the subject of life and the problem. She is one of 
the exceptional girls of the world both in art and 
in life. As artist she is as pure and free from affec- 
tation as in life she is relieved from the necessity 
of it. 

If there are other significant women in modern art 
I am not as yet familiarized with them. These fore- 
going women take their place definitely as artists 
within the circle of women painters like Le Brun, 
Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and are in advance 
of them by being closer to the true appreciation of 
esthetics in inventing them for themselves. 



119 



REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM 

In the consideration of the real factors in the im- 
pressionistic movement, we learn that it is not Monet 
and the younger crew such as Moret, Maufra, 
George d'Espagnat and Guillaumin who give us the 
real weight of this esthetic argument. We find 
Monet going in for hyper-sentimentalized iridis- 
cences which culminate or seem to culminate in the 
"Lily" series until we are forced to say he has let 
us out, once and for all, as far as any further interest 
in the theory with which he was concerned. We are 
no longer held by these artificial and overstrained 
hues, and we find the younger followers offering 
little or nothing to us save an obvious integrity of 
purpose. These younger men had apparently mis- 
comprehended idiosyncrasies for ideas and that, 
save for a certain cleanness of intention, they were 
offering scarcely anything of what is to be found by 
way of realization in the pictures of a really great 
colorist like Renoir. 

The two artists who give the true thrill of this 
phase of the modern movement are without ques- 
tion Pissarro and Sisley. It is the belief of these 
two artists in the appearance of things for them- 
selves, under the influence of the light problem, 
which gives them a strength not always visible at 

120 



REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM 

first by reason of a greater simplicity of effect which 
dominates all of their pictures. We see in both these 
men a real and impressive desire for a more exact- 
ing scientific relation as discovered by intellectual 
consideration, than is to be found in the emotional 
outcry predominating in most of the pictures of 
Monet. These do not hold for us in this day as 
solidly as they were expected to. There is a kind 
of superficiality and consequent dissatisfaction in 
the conspicuous aspiration toward the first flush, 
one may call it, of enthusiasm for impressionistic 
experience. There comes to one who is really con- 
cerned, the ever increasing desire to turn toward 
Pissarro and Sisley and to quietly dispense with 
many or most of Monet's pictures, not to speak of a 
legitimate haste to pass over the phlegmatic en- 
thusiasms of the younger followers. 

One feels that Pissarro must have been a great 
man among men not so great. One feels likewise 
that the stately reticence of a man like Sisley is 
worth far more to us now, if only because we find in 
his works as they hang one beside another In num- 
bers, a soberer and more cautious approach to the 
theme engrossing him and the other artists of the 
movement of that time. In the pictures of Sisley 
there is the charm of the fact for Itself, the delight 
of the problem of placing the object in relation to 
the luminous atmosphere which covers it. 

Men like Pissarro and Sisley were not forgetting 
Courbet and his admirable knowledge of reality. 

121 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

They were not concerned with the spectacular aspect 
of the impressionistic principle, not nearly so much 
as with the satisfying realization of the object under 
the influence of the new scientific problem in esthetics 
with which they were concerned. For myself I am 
out of touch with Monet as a creator and I find 
myself extracting far more satisfaction and belief 
from Pissarro and Sisley, who deal with the problem 
of nature plus idea, with a much greater degree of 
let me even say sincerity, by reason of one fact 
and perhaps the most important one : they were not 
dramatizing the idea in hand. They were not cre- 
ating a furor with pink and lavender haystacks. 
They were satisfied that there was still something 
to be found in the old arrangement of negative and 
positive tones as they were understood before the 
application of the spectrum turned the brains and 
sensibilities of men. In other words Courbet sur- 
vived while the Barbizonians perished. There was 
an undeniable realization of fact still there, clamor- 
ing for consideration. There was the reality then 
even as now, as always. With Pissarro and Sisley 
there appeared the true separation of tone, making 
itself felt most intelligently in the work of these men 
from whom the real separatists Seurat, Signac, and 
Cross were to realize their principle of pointilism, 
of which principle Seurat was to prove himself the 
most satisfactory creative exponent. 

The world of art lost a very great deal in the 
untimely death of Seurat; he was a young man of 

122 



REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM 

great artistic and intellectual gifts. There was an 
artist by the name of Vignon who came in for his 
share during the impressionistic period, probably 
not with any more dramatic glamour than he 
achieves now by his very simple and unpretentious 
pictures. I am sorry for my own pleasure that I 
have not been able to see more of this artist's 
pictures from whom I think our own Theodore 
Robinson must have gained a deal of strength for 
his own bridge building between Bastlen Le Page 
and the Monet "eccentricity," so to call it. 

There is always a reason for reticence, and it is 
usually apt to come from thinking. Sisley and Pis- 
sarro, Vignon, Seurat, and Robinson were thinking 
out a way to legitimize the new fantastic craze for 
prismatic violence, and they found it in the direct 
consideration for the fact. They knew that without 
objects light would have nowhere to fall, that the 
earth confronted them with indispensable phe- 
nomena each one of which had its reason for being. 
They were finding instead of losing their heads, 
which is always a matter of praise. I could stay 
with almost any PIssarro or Sisley I have ever seen, 
as I could always want any Seurat near me, just as 1 
could wish almost any Monet out of sight because I 
find It submerged with emotional extravagance, too 
much enthusiasm for his new pet idea. 

Scientific appreciation had not come with scientific 
Intentions. Like most movements, it was left to 
other than the accredited innovators for its com- 

123 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

pletion and perfection. That is why we find Ce- 
zanne working incessantly to create an art which 
would achieve a union of impressionism and an art 
like the Louvre, as he is said to have characterized 
it for himself. We know now how much Cezanne 
cared for Chardin as well as for Courbet, and Greco. 
There is a reason why he must have respected Pis- 
sarro, far more than he did at any time such men as 
Gaugin, the "flea on his back" as he so vividly and 
perhaps justly named him. There was far more 
hope for a possible great art to come out of Van 
Gogh, who, in his brief seven years had experi- 
mented with very aspect of impressionism that had 
then been divulged. He too was In search of a 
passionate realization of the object. His method of 
heavy stitching in bright hues was not a perfected 
style. It was an extravagant hope toward a personal 
rhythm. He was an "upwardly" aspiring artist by 
reason of his hyper-accentuated religious fervours. 
All these extraneous and one might even say irrele- 
vant attempts toward speedy arrivism are set aside 
in the presence of the almost solemn severity of 
minds like Pissarro and Sisley, and of Cezanne, who 
extracted for himself all that was valuable in the 
passing idea of impressionism. The picture which 
lasts is never the entirely idiosyncratic one. It is 
that picture which strives toward realization of ideas 
through a given principle with which it is involved. 
So it seems then, that if Monet invented the prin- 
ciple of impressionism as applied to painting, Pis- 

124 



REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM 

sarro and Sisley assisted greatly In the creative idea 
for our lasting use and pleasure by the consideration 
of the intellect which they applied to it; just as 
Seurat has given us a far greater realization than 
either Signac or Cross have offered us in the principle 
of pointillism. 

The "test of endurance" in the impressionistic 
movement is borne out; the strength of realization 
is to be found in Pissarro and Sisley and not in the 
vapid niceties of Monet, whose work became thinner 
and thinner by habitual repetitive painting, and by a 
possible false sense of security in his argument. 
Monet had become the habitual impressionist, and 
the habitual in art is its most conspicuous fatality. 
The art of Monet grew weaker throughout the 
various stages of Waterloo, Venice, Rouen, Giver- 
ney, and the Water Lilies which formed periods of 
expression, at least to the mind of the observer. 
Monet's production had become a kind of mercer- 
ized production, and a kind of spurious radiance in- 
vested them, in the end. It remained for Pissarro, 
Sisley, Cezanne, and Seurat to stabilize the new 
discovery, and to give it the stamina it was meant to 
contain, as a scientific idea, scientifically applied. 



125 



ODILON REDON 

With the passing of this rare artist during the 
late summer months,* we are conscious of the silenc- 
ing of one of the foremost lyricists in painting, one 
of the most delicate spirits among those who have 
painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, 
pictures of such real distinction and merit. For 
of true charm, of true grace, of true melodic, Redon 
was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted 
the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has 
this artist, possessed of the love of all that is dream- 
like and fleeting in the more transitory aspect of 
earthly things. No one has ever felt more that 
fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has 
been more jealous of the bounty contained in the 
single glancing of the eye upward to infinity or 
downward among the minuter fragments at his 
feet. 

It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid 
gardens, so much of the morning is in each of his 
fragile works. There seems always to be hovering 
in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of 
which he was the eager spectator, never quite the full 
sunlight of the later day. Essentially he was the 
worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust upon the 
* Of 1917. — Ed. 

126 



ODILON REDON 

moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of 
young boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft 
going of light clouds in a windless sky. These were 
the gentle stimulants to his most virile expression. 
Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never 
struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I 
know them. He knew the loveliness in a profile, he 
saw always the evanescences of light upon light and 
purposeless things. The action or incident in his 
pictures was never more than the touch of some fair 
hand gently and exquisitely brushing some swinging 
flower. He desired implicitly to believe in the im- 
mortality of beauty, that things or entities once they 
were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I 
followed faithfully for a time these fine fragments 
in those corners of Paris where they could be found, 
and there was always sure to be in them, always and 
ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the 
universe. 

I do not know much of his early career as an 
artist. I have read passages from letters which he 
wrote not so long ago, in which he recounts with 
tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how 
he used to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly 
upon some cool hill shaded with young leaves, watch- 
ing the clouds transforming themselves into wing 
shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the 
magic of their delicate color and form — indeed, it 
would seem as if all things had for him been born 
somewhere in the clouds and had condescended to an 

127 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

earthward existence for a brief space, the better to 
show their rarity of grace for the interval. Al- 
though obviously rendered from the object, they 
were still-lifes which seemed to take on a kind of 
cloud life during the very process of his creation. 
They paid tribute to that simple and unaffected 
statement of his — "I have fashioned an art after 
myself." Neither do I know just how long he was 
the engraver and just how long he was the painter 
— it is evident everywhere that his line is the line of 
the fastidious artist on steel and stone. 

Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, 
whether in oil or in pastel, I do not know him, but 
I am thinking always in the presence of them that 
he listened very attentively and with more than a 
common ear to the great masters in music, absorbing 
at every chance all that was in them for him. He 
had in his spirit the classical outline of music, with 
nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we 
call revolt other than the strict adherence to per- 
sonal relationship, no other prejudice than the 
artist's reaction against all that is not really refined 
to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to 
render with extreme tranquillity everything delicate 
and lovely in passing things. There is never any- 
thing in his pictures outside the conventional logic 
of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, 
it is only because Redon himself was like them, joy- 
fully living out the days because they were for him 
ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is Redon who 

128 



ODILON REDON 

has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme 
artistry, the fragment. 

It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, . 
that one finds the true analogy to lyric poetry. This 
lyricism makes them seem mostly Greek — often I 
have thought them Persian, sometimes again, In- 
dian; certainly he learned something from the Chi- 
nese in their porcelains and in their embroidery. I 
am sure he has been fond of these outer influences, 
these Oriental suggestions which were for him the 
spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontane- 
ous ideas, for he, too, had much of all this magic, 
as he had much of the hypnotic quality of jewelry 
and precious stones in all his so delicate pictures, 
firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always 
seemed to contain this suggestion for me : flowers 
that seemed to be much more the embodiment of 
jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just flow- 
ers from the common garden. His flamelike 
touches have always held this preciousness : notations 
rather for the courtly robe or diadem than just draw- 
ings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one 
would expect, quite naturally, from his powers as 
an engraver, in which art he held a first place in his 
time and was the master of the younger school, 
especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the 
painters of this time it is certain he was first among 
them essaying to picture the jewelled loveliness of 
nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was 
in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has 

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ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

created this touch for himself and it is the touch of 
the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have been well if 
Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of ex- 
pression, had followed Redon more closely, as he 
might then have added a little more lustre to these 
very dead literary failures of his. 

I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand 
Khnopff has been influenced greatly by him, but I do 
know that he was beloved by the more modern men, 
that he was revered by all regardless of theories or 
tenets, for there is in existence somewhere in Paris 
a volume of letters and testimonials celebrating some 
anniversary of Redon in proof of it. And I think 
that — regardless of ideas — the artist must always 
find him sympathetic, if for no other reason than 
that he was the essence of refinement, of delicacy, 
and of taste. When I think of Redon I think of 
Shelley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about 
among the stars," and I think somewhat, too, of 
some phrases in Debussy and his unearthly school 
of musicians, for if we are among those who admire 
sturdier things in art we can still love the fine gift 
of purity. And of all gifts Redon has that, cer- 
tainly. 

His art holds, too, something of that breathless- 
ness among the trees one finds in Watteau and in 
Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for he, also, 
was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think 
of Redon as among those who transvaluate all 
earthly sensations in terms of a purer element. We 

130 



ODILON REDON 

think of him as living with his head among the 
mists, alert for all those sudden bursts of light which 
fleck here and there forgotten or unseen places, 
making them live with a new resplendency, full of 
new revealment, perfect with wonder. Happily we 
find in him a hatred of description and of illustration, 
we find these pictures to be illuminations from rich 
pages not observed by the common eye, decorations 
out of a world the like of which has been but too 
seldom seen by those who aspire to vision. Chansons 
sans paroles are they, ringing clearly and flawlessly 
to the eye as do those songs of Verlaine (with whom 
jie has also some relationship) to the well-attuned ear. 
He was the master of the nuance, and the nuance 
was his lyricism, his special gift, his genius. He 
knew perfectly the true vibration of note to note, 
and how few are they whose esthetic emotions are 
built upon the strictly poetic basis, who escape the 
world-old pull towards description and illustration. 
How few, indeed, among those of the materialistic 
vision escape this. But for Redon there was but 
one world, and that a world of imperceptible light 
on all things visible, with always a kind of song of 
adoration upon his lips, as it were, obsessed with 
reverence and child wonder toward every least and 
greatest thing, and it was in these portrayals of 
least things that he exposed their naked loveliness 
as among the greatest. Never did Redon seek for 
the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the 
representation of the whole, that the perfect frag- 

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ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

ment is a true representative of beauty, and that the 
vision of some fair hand or some fair eye is sure 
to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the indi- 
vidual. 

We have as a result of this almost religious devo- 
tion of Redon's, the fairest type of the expression 
of that element which is the eye's equivalent for 
melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated 
his belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either 
all things were lovely in his eye, or they are made 
beautiful by thinking beautifully of them. That was 
the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned 
nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object 
on which his eye rested. No one shall go to Redon 
for any kind of intellectual departure or for any 
highly specialized theory — it is only too evident 
from his work that he had none in mind. He had, 
I think, a definite belief in the theosophic principle 
of aura, in that element of emanation which would 
seem sometimes to surround delicate objects touched 
with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things 
seemed "possessed" by some colorful presence which 
they themselves could in no way be conscious of, 
somewhat the same sort of radiance which floods 
the features of some beauteous person and creates 
a presence there which the person is not even con- 
scious of, the imaginative reality, in other words, 
existing cither within or without everything the eye 
beholds. For him the very air which hovered about 
all things seemed to have, as well, the presence of 

132 



ODILON REDON 

color not usually seen of men, and it was this emana- 
tion or presence which formed the living quality of 
his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery 
heads and hands and wings had their being, through 
which those dusty wings of most unearthly butter- 
flies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given 
us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual 
spaces and the way that these fluttering bodies which 
are little more than spirit themselves have enjoyed a 
beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his apprecia- 
tion of perfect loveliness, like Shelley in his pas- 
sionate desire to transform all local beauty into uni- 
versal terms. 

No one will quarrel with Redon on account of 
what is not in him. What we do find in him is the 
poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest always of 
perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by 
means of a rare and graceful art some of those frag- 
ments which have given him his private and per- 
sonal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating 
a personal art by being himself a rare and lovely 
person. He remains for us one of the finest of 
artists, who has reverted those whisperings from the 
great world of visual melody in which he lived. It 
was with these exquisite fragments that he adorned 
the states of his own soul in order that he might 
present them as artist in tangible art form. We 
are grateful for his lyricism and for his exquisite 
goldsmithery. After viewing his delicately beauti- 
ful pictures, objects take on a new poetic wonder. 

133 



THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING 
With Special Praises for Jennie Vanvleet 

COWDERY 

Some of the finest instances of pure painting will 
be found, not as might be imagined by the layman, 
among the professional artists, but among those 
amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing them- 
selves first of all. If you who read will make close 
reference to those rich examples of the mid-Vic- 
torian period, when it was more or less distinguished 
to take up painting along with the other accomplish- 
ments, you will find that the much tabooed anti- 
macassar period produced a species of painting that 
was as indicative of personal style and research as 
it was fresh in its elemental approach. The per- 
fect instance in modern art of this sort of original 
painting raised to the highest excellence is that of 
Henri Rousseau, the true primitive of our so eclectic 
modern period. No one can have seen a picture of 
this most talented douanier without being convinced 
that technique for purely private personal needs has 
been beautified to an extraordinary degree, 

Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists 
as well as among the best designers of modern time, 
and his pictures hold a quality so related to the ex- 
perience contained in their subjects, as to seem like 

134 



THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING 

the essence of the thing Itself. You feel that un- 
questionably Rousseau's Paris Is Paris, and you are 
made to feel likewise that his jungle scenes are at 
very least his own experiences of his earlier life In 
Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable 
sensitivity and integrity of approach. He was not 
fabricating an art, he was endeavoring to create a 
real picture for his own private satisfaction, and his 
numerous successes are both convincing and ad- 
mirable. 

As I have said, if you have access to a variety of 
amateur pictures created during the mid-Victorian 
era, of whatever style or subject, you will find in 
them the most admirably sincere qualities of paint- 
ing as well as singularly enchanting gifts for sim- 
pllcation and the always engaging respect for the 
fact Itself out of which these painted romanzas are 
created. There was the type of memorial picture 
for instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weep- 
ing willow tree, and its mourner leaning with one 
elbow, usually on the cornice above, where the name 
of the beloved deceased is engraved; below It the 
appropriate motto and Its added wealth of orna- 
mentation in the way of landscape, with houses, hills, 
winding roads, with maybe an animal or two graz- 
ing In the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean 
with pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, 
and more often than not, many species of bright 
flowers In the foreground to heighten the richness 

135 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereave- 
ment. 

I wish I could take you to two perfect examples 
of this sort of amateur painting which I have in 
mind, now in the possession of the Maine Historical 
Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other 
superb and still more perfect example of this sort 
of luxuriously painted memory of life, in the col- 
lection of a noted collector of mid-Victorian splen- 
dours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand 
with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. 
They have been hampered in no way with the banal- 
ity of school technique learned in the manner of the 
ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally 
invent expression out of a personally accumulated 
passion for beauty and they have become aware of it 
through their own intensely personalised contact with 
life. The marine painters of this period, and ear- 
lier, of which there have been almost numberless 
instances, and of whose fine performances there are 
large numbers on view in the Marine Museum in 
Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of pri- 
vate experience with phases of life that men of the 
sea are sure to know, the technical beauty alone of 
which furnishes the spectator with many surprises 
and fascinations in the line of simplicity and di- 
rectness of expression. 

Many of these amateur painters were no longer 
young in point of actual years. Henri Rousseau 
was as we know past forty when he was finally driven 

136 



THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING 

to painting in order to establish his own psychic 
entity. And so it is with all of them, for there 
comes a certain need somewhere in the conscious- 
ness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common 
experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. 
With the result that many of them find their way 
out by taking to paints and brushes and canvas, as- 
tonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored 
layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one 
way or another by something which he thinks he 
does not understand. It is of the charming pic- 
tures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to 
speak here. 

Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact 
you become aware instantly you find yourself in con- 
versation with her. She evidences all the traits and 
characteristics of a lady of her period, which is to 
say the late mid- Victorian, for she must have been 
a graceful young woman herself at the close of this 
fascinating period. And you find, therefore, in her 
quaint and convincingly original pictures, the pas- 
sion for the charms and graces that were consistent 
with the period in which she spent her girlhood, and 
which has left upon her consciousness so dominant 
a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery, despite 
their remoteness of surrounding — for she always 
places her graceful figures, which are no less than 
the embodiments of her own graceful states of being, 
in a dense woodland scene — bring up to the senses 
all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of 

137 - ' 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

the oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the 
shadow, and of the pansy by the hedge. You ex- 
pect these ladies to shake gently upon the air, like 
flowers in the morning, their own fascinating per- 
fumes, as you expect them to recite in the quietude 
of the wood in which they are walking those senti- 
ments which are appropriate to the season and of 
other soft remembrances. 

Mrs. Cowdery might have taken to needlework, 
and sat like many another young woman of that 
time by the window with the sunlight streaming in 
upon the coloured stitches of her work, or she might 
perhaps more strictly have taken to miniature paint- 
ing, the quality of which style is so much in evidence 
in these pleasant pictures of hers. The pictures of 
Mrs. Cowdery will not stimulate the spectator to 
reflect with gravity upon the size of the universe, 
but they dwell entirely upon the intimate charm of 
it, the charm that rises out of breeding and culti- 
vation, and a feeling for the finer graces of the body 
and sweet purities of mind. Mrs. Cowdery is es- 
sentially a breather and a bringer of peace. There 
is no purpose in these gracious and entertaining pic- 
tures, for they are invented solely to recall and make 
permanent, for this lady's own delight, those mo- 
ments of joy of which there must have been many 
if the gentleness and the clear quality of revery in 
them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be 
taken first and last as genuine works of art in their 

138 



THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING 

own way, which is the only way that true works of 
art can be taken seriously. 

The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly en- 
gaging pictures of Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty 
you find in them of the lack of struggle. Their au- 
thor is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for 
the world is without significance in the deeper sense 
to all really serious artists, those who have vital 
information to convey. Mrs. Cowdery's career as 
a painter is of short and impressive duration, barely 
four years she confides, and she has been an engag- 
ing feature of the Society of Independent Artists 
for at least three of these years, I believe. It is her 
picture which she names "1869" which has called 
most attention to her charming talents, and which 
created so convincing an impression among the 
artists for its originality and its insistence upon the 
rendering of beautified personal experience. 

Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girl- 
ish hours with excessive delight, and perhaps it is 
the garish contrast of the youth of the young women 
of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian 
standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts 
this gentle and refined woman to people her gra- 
cious solitudes of spirit with those still more gracious 
ladylike beings which she employs. For her pic- 
tures, that is her most typical ones, contain always 
these groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns 
with perhaps more of the touch of eighteen-eighty 
than of seventy in them, so given to flounces and 

139 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, 
and streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated 
sensations of grace to their quietly sweeping fig- 
ures that seem to be always in a state of harmless 
gossip among themselves. One never knows 
whether it is to be quite morning or afternoon for 
there is seldom or never present the quality of di- 
rect sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually 
walk in the afternoon even now, if there are still 
such virtuous entities as ladies and gentlemen, we 
may presume that these are afternoon seances, 
poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to 
convey to us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well ad- 
justed feeling for the harmony of hues is evident 
in her production as well as in the outline of her 
simple and engaging conversation. 

Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous 
with lyric delicacies, and her own almost girlish 
laughter is like a kind of gracious music for the 
scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in this 
instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost 
inaudible one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of 
visionaries which America has so far produced. It 
is probable that all mystical types have voices soft- 
ened to whispers by the vastness of the experience 
which they have endured. These gentle souls sur- 
vive the period they were born in, and it is their 
clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to 
us in this hectic and metallic era of ours. They 
come, it must be remembered, from the era of Jenny 

140 



THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING 

Lind and Castle Garden, though of course In Mrs. 
Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have sur- 
vived that period literally. It is the grace of that 
period, however, to which she has become heir and 
all her efforts have been exercised in rendering of 
the graces of this playful and pretty hour of hu- 
man life. 

We are reminded, for the moment only, of Mon- 
ticelli, chiefly through similarity of subject, for he 
also was fond of the silent park inhabited with gra- 
cious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy and 
satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there 
is doubtless greater intimacy of feeling, because it 
is a private and very personal issue with her own 
happy soul. She has come out on the other edge 
of the horizon of the world of humans, and finds 
the looking backward so imperatively exquisite as 
to make it necessary for her to paint them with in- 
nocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without 
any previous experience in the handling of homely 
materials, to make them tell in quaint and gracious 
accents the pretty story of the life of her revivified 
imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of 
revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has 
made perfect, for us all, what is perfect in the clas- 
sicized ideality of experience. 

I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Vic- 
torian fans, for they seem more like these frail 
shapes to be wafted by frail and slender hands; I 
seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from 

141 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

huge chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; 
for they become, if you do not scrutinize them too 
closely as works of art, rather as prismatic memories 
bathed in the light of that other time, when men 
and women now grandfathers and grandmothers 
were young and handsome boys and girls, seeking 
each other out in the fashion of polite beaus and 
belles, a period that will never come again, it is cer- 
tain. Mrs. Cowdery need not be alarmed that 
modern painters wish to offer plain homage to her 
fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, 
if such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: 
that there is still something for each of them to do 
in a creative way; and I can think of no more en- 
gaging way for them than to recite the romantic 
history of their youthful longings and realizations 
to a world that has little time for making history 
so romantically inoffensive. 

Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore 
that she has followed her professional daughter's 
advice to take up painting as a pastime, and she has 
already shown in these brief four years, with all 
the intermissions that are natural to any ordinary 
life, that she is a fine type of amateur artist with all 
the world of rediscovery at her disposal. She will 
be hampered in no way with the banalities of in- 
struction offered her by the assuming ones. She 
is beyond the need of anything but self-invention, 
and this will be her own unique and satisfying pleas- 
ure. It Is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate 

142 



THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING 

Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic ca- 
reer. That she will have further success is proven 
by the few pictures already created by her. They 
show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic 
comprehension as applied to her own spiritual 
vision. No intervention will be of any avail, save 
perhaps the permissible intervention of praise and 
congratulations. 

Incidentally, I would recommend to those artists 
who are long since jaded with repetition and suc- 
cess, and there are many of them, to refresh their 
eyes and their senses with the work of these out- 
wardly unassuming but thoroughly convincing ama- 
teurs, like Henri Rousseau, Mrs. Cowdery and the 
niany others whose names do not appear on their 
handsome works of art. There Is such freshness 
of vision and true art experience contained in them. 
They rely upon the imagination entirely for their 
revelations, and there Is always present in these 
unprofessional works of art acute observation of 
fact and fine gifts for true fancy. These amateurs 
are never troubled with the "how" of mediocre 
painting; neither are they troubled with the wiles 
of the outer world. They remain always charming 
painters of personal visionary experience, and as 
such are entitled to praise for their genuine gifts in 
rendering, as well as for a natural genius for inter- 
pretation. 



143 



HENRI ROUSSEAU 

Not long since, we heard much of naivete — it 
was the fashion among the schools and the lesser 
individuals to use this term in describing the work 
of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by ec- 
centricity of means. It was often the term applied 
to bizarrerie — it was fashionable to draw naively, 
as it was called. We were expected to believe in 
a highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it 
was the resort of a certain number who wanted to 
realize speedy results among the unintelligent. It 
was a pose which lasted not long because it was 
obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had 
not the prescribed ease about it and showed signs 
of labor. It had, for a time, its effect upon really 
intelligent artists with often respectable results, as 
it drew the tendency away from too highly involved 
sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many 
ways, and helped men to a franker type of self-ex- 
pression; and was, as we may expect, something 
apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the 
great modern individualists, those who were seek- 
ing direct contact with subject. 

We have learned in a short space of time that 
whatever was exceptional in the ideas and attitudes 
of the greater ones, as we know them, was not at 

144 



HENRI ROUSSEAU 

all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected 
naivete such as we have heard so much about, but 
was, on another hand, a real phase of their original- 
ity, the other swing of the pendulum, so to call it. 
It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it 
was a true part of their personal gesture, and was 
something they could not, and need not, do anything 
about, as if it were the normal tendency in them in 
their several ways. We all of us know that modern 
art is not haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its in- 
tention at least, certainly not the outcome of oddity, 
of whim, or of eccentricity, for these traits belong 
to the superficial and cultivated. We have found 
that with the best moderns there has been and is 
inherent in them the same sincerity of feeling, the 
same spirit directing their research. The single pe- 
culiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, 
is its special relationship to the time in which it is 
being produced, explicitly of this age. 

What we know of the men, much or little, proves 
that they are, and have all been, simple earnest men, 
intelligent, following nowise blindly in pursuit of 
fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or 
freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of 
a logic essentially of themselves, and of the period 
they represent; and because this period is not the 
period of sentimentality in art, but a period striving 
toward a more vigorous type of values — something 
as beautiful as the machinery of our time — it is not 
as yet to any great degree cared for, understood nor, 

145 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

up to very recently, even trusted. It has destroyed 
old fashioned romance, and the common eye has 
ceased to focus, or rather, does not wish to con- 
centrate on things which do not visualize the lit- 
erary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle 
was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this 
time, and certainly among the truest of all times. 
As much as a man can remain child, Rousseau re- 
mained the child, and as much as a man could be 
naive and childlike, certainly it was this simple artist 
who remained so. 

If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began 
his career as painter at the age of forty, though it 
Is quite possible and probable that he was painting 
whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in all 
of his spare intervals, and with but one object in 
view apparent: to give forth in terms of painting 
those phases of his own personal life which remained 
indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially al- 
ways vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to 
be the scenes or incidents of loveliness to his fine 
imagination. We find them covering a rather wide 
range of experience, apparently in two places, some- 
where in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the for- 
mer, experiences of youth in some sort of govern- 
mental service I believe, and the latter, the more in- 
timate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris 
herself and of those people who created for him 
the intimacy of his home life, and the life which 

146 



HENRI ROUSSEAU 

centered about the charming rue de Perelle where 
he lived. 

In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest indi- 
vidual expressions of the amateur spirit in painting, 
taking actually a place among the examples of paint- 
ings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the 
sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the 
very same quality of directness and simplicity, and 
of contact with the prevailing image chosen for rep- 
resentation. He was too evidently the product of 
himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense 
something strange springing up out of the soil in 
the dark of night, he was not mushroom. He did 
not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt 
if he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so 
much was he that element himself. 

It is with fascination that we think of him as 
living his life out after his discharge for incompe- 
tency from the customs service outside the fortifica- 
tions of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of pov- 
erty upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from 
the world famous quartiers, and almost certainly 
knowing nothing of them. That there was a 
Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not 
likely that he knew, or if he knew, not more than 
vaguely. He drew his quaint inspirations directly 
from the sources of nature and some pencil drawings 
I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, 
amounting to love and worship, which he had for 

147 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

nature and the phenomena of her, to be disclosed at 
every hedge. 

If he was no success as a douanier, he was learn- 
ing a great deal, meanwhiles, about those delicate 
and radiant skies which cover Paris at all times, 
charming always for their lightness and delicacy, 
pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was dur- 
ing this service of his at the city's gates that he 
learned his lovely sense of blacks and greys and sil- 
vers, of which Paris offers so much always, and 
which predominate in his canvases. Even his trop- 
ical scenes strive in no way toward artificiality of 
effect, but give rather the sense of their profundity 
than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of 
peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been 
at home in them in his imagination, being so well 
at home in those scenes of Paris which were daily 
life to him. We find in Rousseau true naivete, 
without struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and 
of emotion, following diligently with mind and with 
spirit the forms of those stored images that have 
registered themselves with directness upon the area 
of his imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered 
with perfect simplicity for us in these quaint pictures 
of his, superb in the richness of quality which makes 
of them, what they are to the eye that is sympathetic 
to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all 
the machinations and intrigues of the outer world, 
a life intimate with itself, remote from all agencies 
having no direct association with it, living with a 

148 



HENRI ROUSSEAU 

sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclo- 
sures, occupied apparently with nothing beyond the 
loveliness contained In them. 

There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the 
mind in the work of this simple man. It was a 
wealth of innocence that tinged all his methods, and 
his pictures are as simple In their appeal as are the 
declarations of Jacob Boehme — they are the songs 
of innocence and experience of a nature for whom 
all the world was beautiful, and have about them 
the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet 
reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the 
pictures of this true and charming naif, will find 
nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme simplicity, 
he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of Image that 
characterizes every touch of school. He was taught 
only by nature and consulted only her relationships 
and tendencies. There is never a mistaking of that. 
Nature was his influence, and he saw with an un- 
trammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, 
and affixed no falsity of feeling, or anything, to 
his forms which might have detracted from their ex- 
treme simplicity. He had "first sight," first contact 
with the Image, and sought nothing else beyond this, 
and a very direct correspondence with memories dic- 
tated all his efforts. 

That Rousseau was musical, is shown in the nat- 
ural grace of his compositions, and his Ideas were 
simple as the early songs of France are simple, 
speaking of everyday things with simple heart and 

149 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

voice, and he painted frankly what he saw in pre- 
cisely the way he saw it. We, who love richness 
and sobriety of tone, will never tire of Rousseau's 
beautiful blacks and greys, and probably no one has 
excelled them for delicacy of appreciation, and per- 
fection of gradation. It will be long before the 
landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before 
the exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Har- 
lequin" will fade from remembrance, we shall re- 
member them all for their loveliness in design, a 
gift which never failed him, no matter what the 
subject. Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that 
taught him this, and therein lay his special power, 
a genuine feeling for the richness of laces and bro- 
cades in full and subdued tones, such as one would 
find in the elaborate intricacies of tropical foliage, 
strange leaves intermingled with parrots, monkeys, 
strange white lilies on high stalks, tigers peering 
through highly ornate foliage and branches inter- 
twined, all excellently suggestive of that foreign land 
in which the mind wanders and finds itself so much 
at home. 

"Le Charmeur," "Jadwigha," in these are con- 
centrated all that is lovely in the land of legend; 
and, like all places of legend, replete with imagina- 
tive beauty, the places where loveliness and beauty 
of form congregate, after they have passed through 
the sensuous spaces of the eye travelling somewhere 
to an abode where all those things are that are per- 
fect, they live forever. Rousseau was a charming 

150 



HENRI ROUSSEAU 

and lovable child, whether he was painting or 
whether he was conducting his own little orchestra, 
composed of those people who kept shop around his 
home, and it is as the child of his time that he must 
be considered, child in verity among the sophisti- 
cated moderns who believed and believe more in 
intellect than in anything else, many of whom paid 
tribute to him, and reverenced him, either in terms 
of sincere friendship, or by occasional visit. The 
various anecdotes, touching enough, are but further 
proof of the innocence of this so simple and untu- 
tored person. 

The real amateur spirit has, we like to think, much 
in its favor, if only for its freshness, its spontaneity, 
and a very gratifying naturalness. Rousseau was 
all of this, and lived In a world untouched, he wove 
about himself, like other visionaries, a soft veil hid- 
ing all that was grossly unreal to him from all that 
was real, and for Rousseau, those things and places 
he expressed existed vividly for him, and out of 
them his pictures became true creations. He was 
the real naif, because he was the real child, unaf- 
fected and unspoiled, and painting was for him but 
the key of heaven that he might open another door 
for the world's weary eye. 



151 



PART TWO 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT 

Where is our once charming acrobat — our min- 
strel of muscular music? What has become of these 
groups of fascinating people gotten up in silk and 
spangle? Who may the evil genius be who has 
taken them and their fascinating art from our stage, 
who the ogre of taste that has dispensed with them 
and their charm? How seldom it is in these times 
that one encounters them, as formerly when they 
were so much the charming part of our lighter en- 
tertainment. What are they doing since popular 
and fickle notions have removed them from our 
midst? 

It is two years since I have seen the American 
stage. I used to say to myself in other countries, 
at least America is the home of real variety and the 
real lover of the acrobat. But I hear no one say- 
ing much for him these days, and for his charming 
type of art. 

What has become of them all, the graceful little 
lady of the slack wire, those charming and lovely 
figures that undulate upon the air by means of the 
simple trapeze, those fascinating ensembles and all 
the various types of melodic muscular virtuosity? 

We have been given much, of late, of that vir- 
tuosity of foot and leg which is usually called danc- 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

ing; and that is excellent among us here, quite the 
contribution of the American, so singularly the prod- 
duct of this special physique. Sometimes I think 
there are no other dancers but Americans. It used 
to be so delightful a diversion watching our acro- 
bat and his group with their strong and graceful 
bodies writhing with rhythmical certitude over a bar 
or upon a trapeze against a happily colored space. 
Now we get little more in the field of acrobatics 
beyond a varied buck and wing; everything seems 
tuxedoed for drawing room purposes. We get no 
more than a decent handspring or two, an over- 
elaborated form of split. It all seems to be over 
with our once so fashionable acrobat. There is no 
end of good stepping, as witness the Cohan Revue, 
a dancing team in Robinson Crusoe, Jr., and "Archie 
and Bertie" (I think they call themselves). This 
in itself might be called the modern American school : 
the elongated and elastic gentleman who finds his 
co-operator among the thin ones of his race, ar- 
tistically speaking. I did not get to the circus this 
year, much to my regret; perhaps I would have 
found my lost genius there, among the animals dis- 
porting themselves in less charitable places. But 
we cannot follow the circus naturally, and these min- 
strel folk are disappearing rapidly. Variety seems 
quite to have given them up and replaced them with 
often very tiresome and mediocre acts of singing. 

How can one forget, for instance, the Famille 
Bouvier who used to appear regularly at the fetes 

156 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT 

in the streets of Paris in the summer season, living 
all of them in a roving gipsy wagon as is the custom 
of these fete people. What a charming moment it 
was always to see the simple but well built Mile. 
Jeanne of twenty-two pick up her stalwart and beau- 
tifully proportioned brother of nineteen, a strong, 
broad-shouldered, manly chap, and balance him on 
one hand upright in the air. It was a classic mo- 
ment in the art of the acrobat, interesting to watch 
the father of them all training the fragile bodies of 
the younger boys and girls to the systematic move- 
ment of the business while the mother sat in the 
doorway of the caravan nursing the youngest at 
the breast, no doubt the perfect future acrobat. 
And how charming it was to look in at the doors of 
these little houses on wheels and note the excellent 
domestic order of them, most always with a canary 
or a linnet at the curtained window and at least one 
cat or dog or maybe both. This type is the pro- 
genitor of our stage acrobat, it is the primitive stage 
of these old-time troubadours, and it is still prevalent 
in times of peace in France. The strong man got- 
ten in tawdry pink tights and much worn black vel- 
vet with his very elaborate and drawn out speeches, 
in delicate French, concerning the marvels of his art 
and the long wait for the stipulated number of dix 
centimes pieces before his marvellous demonstration 
could begin. This is, so to say, the vagabond ele- 
ment of our type of entertainment, the wandering 
minstrel who keeps generation after generation to 

157 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

the art of his forefathers, this fine old art of the 
pavement and the open country road. But we look 
for our artist in vain these days, those groups whose 
one art is the exquisite rhythmical display of the 
human body, concerted muscular melody. We can- 
not find him on the street In the shade of a stately 
chestnut tree as once in Paris we found him at least 
twice a year, and we seek him in vain in our mod- 
ern music hall. 

Is our acrobatic artist really gone to his esthetic 
death; has he given his place permanently to the 
ever present singing lady who is always telling you 
who her modiste is, sings a sentimental song or two 
and then disappears; to the sleek little gentleman 
who dances off a moment or two to the tune of his 
doll-like partner whose voice is usually littler than 
his own? Perhaps our acrobat is still the delight 
of those more characteristic audiences of the road 
whose taste is less fickle, less blase. This is so 
much the case with the arts in America — the fash- 
ions change with the season's end and there is never 
enough of novelty; dancing is already dying out, 
skating will not prevail for long among the idle; 
what shall we predict for our variety which is in its 
last stages of boredom for us? 

I suspect the so-called politeness of vaudeville of 
the elimination of our once revered acrobats. The 
circus notion has been replaced by the parlor enter- 
tainment notion. Who shall revive them for us, 
who admire their simple and unpretentious art; why 

158 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT 

is there not someone among the designers with suf- 
ficient interest in this type of beauty to make attrac- 
tive settings for them, so that we may be able to 
enjoy them at their best, which in the theater we 
have never quite been able to do — designs that will 
in some way add luster to an already bright and 
pleasing show of talents. 

I can see, for instance, a young and attractive girl 
bareback, rider on a cantering white horse inscrib- 
ing wondrous circles upon a stage exquisitely in 
harmony with herself and her white or black horse 
as the case might be ; a rich cloth of gold backdrop 
carefully suffused with rose. There could be noth- 
ing handsomer, for example, than young and grace- 
ful trapezists swinging melodically in turquoise blue 
doublets against a fine peacock background or it 
might be a rich pale coral — all the artificial and spec- 
tacular ornament dispensed with. We are expected 
to get an exceptional thrill when some dull person 
appears before a worn velvet curtain to expatiate 
with inappropriate gesture upon a theme of Chopin 
or of Beethoven, ideas and attitudes that have noth- 
ing whatsoever to do with the musical intention; yet 
our acrobat whose expression is certainly as attrac- 
tive, if not much more so generally, has always to 
perform amid fatigued settings of the worst sort 
against red velvet of the most depraved shade pos- 
sible. We are tired of the elaborately costumed 
person whose charms are trivial and insignificant, 
we are well tired also of the ordinary gentleman 

159 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

dancer and of the songwriter, we are bored to ex- 
tinction by the perfectly dull type of playlet which 
features some well known legitimate star for ille- 
gitimate reasons. Our plea is for the re-creation 
of variety into something more conducive to light 
pleasure for the eye, something more conducive to 
pleasing and stimulating enjoyment. Perhaps the 
reinstatement of the acrobat, this revival of a really 
worthy kind of expression, would effect the change, 
relieve the monotony. The argument is not too 
trivial to present, since the spectator is that one for 
whom the diversion is provided. 

I hear cries all about from people who once were 
fond of theater and music hall that there is an in- 
conceivable dullness pervading the stage; the habit- 
ual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the 
present time with a degree of pleasure, much less 
with ease. It has ceased to be v/hat it once was, 
what its name implies. If the old school inclined 
toward the rough too much, then certainly the new 
inclines distressingly toward the refined — the stage 
that once was so full of knockabout is now so full 
of stand-still; variety that was once a joy is now 
a bore. Just some uninteresting songs at the piano 
before a giddy drop is not enough these days; and 
there are too many of such. There is need of a 
greater activity for the eye. The return of the 
acrobat in a more modern dress would be the ap- 
propriate acquisition, for we still have appreciation 

1 60 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT 

for all those charming geometries of the trapeze, the 
bar, and the wire. 

It is to be hoped that these men will return to 
us, stimulating anew their delightful kind of poetry 
of the body and saving our variety performances 
from the prevailing plague of monotone. 



i6i 



VAUDEVILLE 

I HAVE but recently returned from the vaudeville 
of the centuries. Watching the kick and the glide 
of very ancient performers. I have spent a year 
and a half down in the wonderful desert country of 
the Southwest. I have wearied, however, of the 
ancient caprice, and turn with great delight to my 
old passion, vaudeville. I return with glee to the 
ladies and gentlemen and pet animals of the stage, 
including the acrobats. Is there one who cares for 
these artists and for their rhythmical gesture more 
than myself? I cannot think so. I have wished 
with a real desire to create new sets for them, to 
establish an altogether new tradition as regards the 
background of these charming artists. If that were 
the chosen field for my esthetic activities, I should 
be famous by now for the creation of sets and drops 
by which these exceptional artists might make a 
far more significant impression upon the type of 
public they essay to interest and amuse. 

I would begin first of all by severing them from 
the frayed traditions of worn plush and sequin, rid 
them of the so inadequate back drop such as is given 
them, the scene of Vesuvius in eruption, or the walk 
in the park at Versailles. They need first of all 
large plain spaces upon which to perform, and enjoy 

162 



VAUDEVILLE 

their own remarkably devised patterns of body. 1 
speak of the acrobats, the animals, the single and 
double dancers who perform "down in one" more 
especially. The so called headliners have their 
plush parlours with the inevitable purple or rose 
lamp, and the very much worn property piano just 
barely in tune. Only the dressmaker and the in- 
terior decorator can do things for them, as we see 
in the case of Kitty Gordon. It is to be hoped that 
a Beardsley of the stage will one day appear and 
really do something for the dainty type of person 
or the superbly theatric artist such as Miss Gordon, 
Valeska Suratt, and the few other remarkable 
women of the vaudeville stage. 

I am more concerned with the less appreciated 
artists. I would see that they glitter by their own 
brilliance. Why, for instance, should a fine act like 
the Four Danubes and others of their quality be 
tagged on to the end of a bill, at which time the 
unmannerly public decides to go home or hurry to 
some roof or other, or dining place? 

I should like seeing the Brothers Rath likewise, 
perhaps as refined acrobatic artists as have been seen 
on our stage for some time, in a set that would 
show them to better advantage, and give the public 
a greater intimacy with the beauty of their act than 
can be had beyond the first six rows of the Winter 
Garden. They are interposed there as a break be- 
tween burlesques, which is not the place for them. 
I would "give" them the stage while they are on 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

it. Theirs is a muscular beauty which has not been 
excelled. I have no doubt that if I attempted to es- 
tablish these ideas with the artists whom I spend 
so much time in championing, they would no doubt 
turn aside with the word "highbrow" on their lips. 
They would have to be shown that they need these 
things, that they need the old-fashioned ideas re- 
moved, and fresher ones put in their place. I have 
expressed this intention once before in print, per- 
haps not so vehemently. I should like to elabor- 
ate. I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. 
An orchestra of that size for the larger concerted 
groups, numbers of stringed instruments for the 
wirewalkers and jugglers, a series of balanced wood- 
winds for others, and so on down the line, accord- 
ing to the quality of the performer. There should 
be a large stage for many elephants, ponies, dogs, 
tigers, seals. The stage should then be made more 
intimate for the solos, duets, trios, and quartets 
among the acrobats. I think a larger public should 
be made aware of the beauty and skill of these peo- 
ple, who spend their lives in perfecting grace and 
power of body, creating the always fascinating pat- 
tern and form, orchestration if you will, the orches- 
tration of the muscles into a complete whole. You 
will of course say, go to the circus, and get it all 
at once. The circus is one of the most charming 
places in existence, because it is one of the last words 
in orchestrated physical splendour. But the circus 
is too diffused, too enormous in this country to per- 

164 



VAUDEVILLE 

mit of concentrated interest, attention, or pleasure. 
One goes away with many little bits. It is because 
the background is made up of restless nervous dots, 
all anxious to get the combined quota which they 
have paid for, when in reality they do not even get 
any one thing. It is the alert eye which can go 
over three rings and two stages at once and enjoy 
the pattern of each of them. It is a physical im- 
possibility really. 

I think we should be made aware in finer ways 
of the artists who open and close our bills. Why 
must the headliner always be a talking or a singing 
person who tells you how much money he needs, or 
how much she is getting? There is more than one 
type of artistic personality for those who care for 
vaudeville. Why doesn't a team like the Rath 
Brothers, for example, find itself the feature at- 
traction? Must there always be the string of un- 
necessary little men and women who have such a 
time trying to fill up their twenty-two minutes or 
their fourteen? Why listen forever to puppy-like 
song writers when one can hear and watch a great 
artist like Ella Shields? My third visit to Ella 
Shields convinces me that she is one of the finest 
artists I have ever heard, certainly as fine in her way 
as Guilbert and Chevalier were. It is a rare priv- 
ilege to be able to enjoy artists like Crock — Mark 
Sheridan — who is now dead, I am told. Mark, 
with his "They all walk the wibbly-wobbly walk, 
they all wear the wibbly-wobbly ties," and so on. 

165 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Mark is certainly being missed by a great many 
who care for the pleasure of the moment. When I 
look at and listen to the aristocratic artist Ella 
Shields, I feel a quality in her of the impeccable 
Mrs. Fiske. And then I am thinking of another 
great woman, Fay Templeton. What a pity we 
must lose them either by death or by decisions in 
life. Ella Shields with her charming typification 
of "Burlington Bertie from Bow." 

The other evening as I listened to Irene Frank- 
lin, I heard for certain what I had always thought 
were notes from the magic voice of dear old Fay. 
Unforgettable Fay. How can one ever say enough 
about her? I think of Fay along with my single 
glimpses of Duse, Ada Rehan, Coquelin. You see 
how I love her, then. Irene Franklin has the qual- 
ity of imitation of the great Fay without, I think, 
the real magic. Nevertheless I enjoy her, and I 
am certain she has never been finer than now. She 
has enriched herself greatly by her experiences the 
last two years, and seems at the height of her power. 
It was good to get, once again, little glimpses of 
her Childs waitress and the chambermaid. It 
seemed to me that there was a richer quality of at- 
mosphere in the little Jewish girl with the ring curls 
and the red mittens, as also in her French girl with, 
by the way, a beautiful gown of rich yellow silk 
Frenchily trimmed in vermilion or orange, I couldn't 
make out which. The amusing French girl, who 
having picked up many fag-ends of English from 

i66 



VAUDEVILLE 

her experience with the soldats Americains — got 
her "animals" mixed — "you have my goat, I have 
your goat, et — tie ze bull outside," and so on. I 
am crossing Irene and Fay here because I think them 
similar, only I must say I think the magic was greater 
in Fay, because possibly Fay was the greater stu- 
dent of emotion. Fay had the undercurrent, and 
Irene has perfected the surface. If Irene did study 
Fay at any time, and I say this respectfully, she per- 
haps knows that Fay went many times to Paris to 
study Rejane. The light entertainer is, as we know, 
very often a person of real intellect. 

If you want distinction, then, you will get it in 
the presence of Ella Shields. Her "Burlington 
Bertie" is nothing less than a chef d'oeuvre; "Tom 
Lipton, he's got lots of 'oof — he sleeps on the roof, 
and I sleep in the room over him." Bertie, who, 
having been slapped on the back by the Prince of 
Wales (and some others) and asked why he didn't 
go and dine with "Mother," replied — "I can't, for 
I've just had a banana with Lady Diana. . . . I'm 
Burlington Bertie from Bow." Miss Shields shows 
also that she can sing a sentimental song without 
slushing it all over with saccharine. She has mas- 
tered the droll English quality of wit with real per- 
fection. I regret I never saw Vesta Tilley, with 
whom the old tops compare her so favourably. Su- 
perb girls all these. Fay, Ella, Cissie, Vesta, as well 
as Marie Lloyd, and the other inimitable Vesta — 
Victoria. 

167 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Among the "coming soon," we have Miss Juliet, 
whom I recall with so much pleasure from the last 
immemorable Cohan Revue. I wait for her. I 
consider myself fortunate to be let in on James 
Watts. We thought our Eddy Foy a comic one. 
He was, for I remember the Gibson girl with the 
black velvet gown and the red flannel undershirt. I 
swing my swagger stick in the presence of Mr. 
Watts by way of applause. His art is very deli- 
cately understood and brought out. It has a fine 
quality of broad caricature with a real knowledge 
of economy such as Grock is master of. The three 
episodes are certainly funny enough. I find myself 
caring more for the first, called "June Day," since 
he reminds me so strongly in make-up of the French 
caricaturists in drawing, Rouveyre and Toulouse- 
Lautrec. Mr. Watts's feeling for satirical make-up 
is a fine shade of artistry in itself. He has excel- 
lent feeling for the broad contrast and for fierce 
insinuation at the same time. If you want real un- 
alloyed fun, Mr. Watts will supply you. Nor will 
Grock disappoint you. Quite on the contrary, no 
matter what you are expecting. 

I do not know why I think of vaudeville as I think 
of a collection of good drawings. Unless it is be- 
cause the sense of form is the same in all of the arts. 
The acrobat certainly has line and mass to think of, 
even if that isn't his primal concern. He knows how 
he decorates the space on which he operates. To 
make another comparison, then, Grock is the Forain 

i68 



VAUDEVILLE 

of vaudeville. He achieves great plastic beauty 
with distinguished economy of means. He dis- 
penses with all superfluous gesture, as does the great 
French illustrator. Crock is entirely right about 
clownery. You are either funny or you are not. 
No amount of study will produce the gift for hu- 
mour. It is there, or it isn't. Crock's gift for mu- 
sicianship is a singular combination to find with the 
rest of his artistry. It goes with the remarkably 
refined look in his face, however, as he sits upon 
the back of the seatless chair, and plays the little 
concertina with superb execution. There are no 
"jumps" in Crock's performance. His moods flow 
from one into another with a masterly smoothness, 
and you are aware when he is finished that you have 
never seen that sort of foolery before. Not just 
that sort. It is the good mind that satisfies, as in 
the case of James Watts, and Miss Shields. 

From elephants carrying in their trunks chate- 
laines of Shetland ponies, curtseying at the close of 
the charming act like a pretty miss at her first com- 
ing out, to such work as the Four Danubes give you 
as the closing number, with Irene as a lead, you 
are, to say the least, carried over the dreadful spots, 
such as the young man who sways out like a burlesque 
queen and tells you whom he was with before Keith 
got him. His name should be "Pusher," "Advance 
Man," or something of that sort, and not artist. 
What he gives you, you could find just as well if not 
better done on Fourteenth Street. He has a rib- 

169 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

bon-counter, adenoid voice production that no really 
fine artist could afford. He will "get by," because 
anything does, apparently. 

One turns to the big artist for relief, even though 
minor artists like The Brown Sisters charm so surely 
with their ivory and silver diamond-studded accor- 
dions, giving very pleasing transitions from grave to 
gay In arias and tunes we know. Accordions and 
concertinas are very beautiful to me, when played 
by artists like these girls, and by such as Joe Caw- 
thorne, and Grock. 

There are more dancing men of quality this sea- 
son, it seems to me, who are obscured by dancing 
ladies of fame, and not such warrantable artistry. 
Perhaps it is because male anatomy allows of greater 
eccentricity and playfulness. There are no girls who 
have just such laughing legs as the Inimitable Fran- 
ces White. It is the long-legged American boy who 
beats the world in this sort of thing. 

The lovely bit of hockey which James Barton 
gives is for me far more distinguished than all the 
rest of his work in the Winter Garden Revue. He 
Is a real artist, but it is work that one sees rather a 
deal of this season, whereas the hockey dance is like 
nothing else to be found. A lovely moment of 
rhythmic leg work. We are now thoroughly fa- 
miliar with the stage drunk, as we have long been 
familiarized by Weber and Fields with the stage 
Jew, which is fortunately passing out for lack of 
artist to present It. Leon Errol Is good for once, 

170 



VAUDEVILLE 

even twice. He is quite alone in his very witty 
falls and runs. They are full of the struggle of 
the drunk to regain his character and manhood. The 
act lives on a very flat plane otherwise. It has no 
roundness. 

I have come on my list to Mijares and Co., in 
"Monkey Business." We have the exquisite cri- 
terion always for the wire, in the perfect Bird Mill- 
man. "Monkey Business" is a very good act, and 
both men do excellent work on the taut and slack 
wire. "Monkey," in this case being a man, does 
as beautiful a piece of work as I know of. I have 
never seen a back somersault upon a high wire. I 
have never heard of it before. There may be whole 
generations of artists gifted in this particular stunt. 
You have here, nevertheless, a moment of very great 
beauty in the cleanness of this man's surprising agil- 
ity and sureness. The monkey costume hinders the 
beauty of the thing. It should be done with pale 
blue silk tights against a cherry velvet drop, or else 
in deep ultramarine on an old gold background. 

The acrobatic novelty called "The Legrohs" re- 
lies chiefly on its most exceptional member, who 
would be complete without the other two. He is 
most decidedly a virtuoso in vaudeville. Very 
gifted, certainly, if at moments a little disconcerting 
in the flexibility and the seemingly uncertain turns 
of his body. It is the old-fashioned contortionism 
saved by charming acrobatic variations. This "Le- 
groh" knows how to make a superb pattern with 

171 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

his body, and the things he does with it are done with 
such ease and skill as to make you forget the actual 
physical effort and you are lost for the time being 
in the beauty of this muscular kaleidoscopic bril- 
liancy. You feel it is like "puzzle — find the man" 
for a time, but then you follow his exquisite changes 
from one design into another with genuine delight, 
and appreciate his excessive grace and easy rapidity. 
He gives you chiefly the impression of a dragon-fly 
blown in the wind of a brisk morning over cool 
stretches of water. You would expect him to land 
on a lily-pad any moment and smooth his wings 
with his needle-like legs. 

So it is the men and women of vaudeville trans- 
form themselves into lovely flower and animal forms, 
and the animals take on semblances of human sen- 
sibility in vaudeville. It is the superb arabesque of 
the beautiful human body that I care for most, and 
get the most from in these cameo-like bits of beauty 
and art. So brief they are, and like the wonders 
of sea gardens as you look through the glass bottoms 
of tlie little boats. So like the wonders of the 
microscopic, full of surprising novelties of colour 
and form. So like the kaleidoscope in the ever 
changing, ever shifting bits of colour reflecting each 
other, falling into new patterns with each twist of 
the toy. If you care for the iridescence of the 
moment you will trust vaudeville as you are not able 
to trust any other sort of a performance. You 
have no chance for the fatigue of problem. You 

172 



VAUDEVILLE 

are at rest as far as thinking is concerned. It is 
something for the eye first and last. It is some- 
thing for the ear now and then, only very seldomly, 
however. For me, they are the saviours of the dull- 
est art in existence, the art of the stage. Duse was 
quite right about it. The stage should be swept of 
actors. It is not a place for imitation and pho- 
tography. It is a place for the laughter of the 
senses, for the laughter of the body. It is a place 
for the tumbling blocks of the brain to fall in heaps. 
I give first place to the acrobat and his associates 
because it is the art where the human mind is for 
once relieved of its stupidity. The acrobat is mas- 
ter of his body and he lets his brain go a-roving 
upon other matters, if he has one. He is expected 
to be silent. He would agree with William James, 
transposing "music prevents thinking" into "talking 
prevents silence." In so many instances, it pre- 
vents conversation. That is why I like tea chit- 
chat. Words are never meant to mean anything 
then. They are simply given legs and wings, and 
they jump and fly. They land where they can, and 
fall flat if they must. The audience that patronizes 
vaudeville would do well to be present at most first 
numbers, and remain for most or many of the clos- 
ing ones. A number, I repeat, like the Four Dan- 
ubes, should not be snubbed by any one. 

I have seen recently, then, by way of summary, 
four fine bits of artistry in vaudeville — Ella Shields, 
James Watts, the Brothers Rath, and the Four Dan- 

173 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

ubes. I shall speak again of these people. They 
are well worth it. They turn pastime into perfect 
memory. They are, therefore, among the great ar- 
tists. 



174 



A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE 

I AM impelled to portray, at this time, my devo- 
tion to the little equestrienne, by the presence of a 
traveling circus in these lofty altitudes in which I 
am now living, seven thousand feet above the sea, 
in our great southwest. The mere sight of this 
master of the miniature ring, with all the atmos- 
phere of the tent about him, after almost insur- 
mountable difficulties crossing the mountains, over 
through the canyons of this expansive country, de- 
livering an address in excellently chosen English, 
while poised at a considerable height on the wire, to 
the multitude on the ground below him, during which 
time he is to give what is known as the "free ex- 
hibit" as a high wire artist — all this turns me once 
more to the ever charming theme of acrobatics in 
general and equestrianism in particular, and it is of 
a special genius in this field that I wish to speak. 

I have always been a lover of these artists of 
bodily vigour, of muscular melody, as I like to call 
it. As I watched this ringmaster of the little trav- 
eling circus, this master mountebank of the sturdy 
figure, ably poised upon his head on the high wire, 
outlined against the body of the high mountain in 
the near distance, about which the thunder clouds 
were huddling, and in and out of which the light- 

175 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

ning was sharply playing, it all formed for me an- 
other of those perfect sensations from that phase 
of art expression known as the circus. My happi- 
est memories in this field are from the streets of 
Paris before the war, the incomparably lovely fetes. 
Only the sun knows where these dear artists may 
be now. 

But I am wanting to tell of the little equestrienne, 
whose work has for the past five years been a source 
of genuine delight to me, charming little May Wirth, 
of Australian origin, with her lovely dark eyes, and 
captivating English accent. If you have a genuine 
sympathy for this sort of expression, it is but natural 
that you want to get inside the ring, and smell the 
turf with them, and so it was the representative of 
this gifted little woman who brought us together. 
It is, in the first place, a pity that there is so little 
vv-ritten of the history of these people, so little ma- 
terial from which to gather the development of the 
idea of acrobatics in general, or of any one phase in 
particular. It would be impossible to learn who 
was the first aerial trapezist, for instance, or where 
high wire performing was brought from, just when 
the trick of adjusting the body to these difficult and 
strenuous rhythms was originated. They cannot 
tell you themselves. Only if there happens to be 
more than two generations in existence can you trace 
the development of this form of athletic entertain- 
ment. It may have begun with the Egyptians, it 
may have begun with the first gypsies. 

; 176 



A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE 

These people do not write their history, they sim- 
ply make it among themselves, and it is handed 
down through the generations. When I asked May 
Wirth for information, she said she knew of none 
on the subject, save that she herself sprang from 
five generations of acrobats and equestrians, and that 
it is terrifically hard labour from beginning to end, 
equestrianism in particular, since it requires a knowl- 
edge of several if not all the other physical arts com- 
bined, such as high wire walking, handspring and 
somersault, trapeze work, bars, ballet dancing, etc.; 
that she herself had begun as a child, and had run 
the entire gamut of these requirements, coming out 
the finished product, so to speak, in all but ballet 
dancing, which she disliked, and wept always when 
the time came for her lesson in this department. 

When one sees the incomparable brilliancy of this 
little woman of the horse, watching her marvellous 
ground work, which is in itself an example of vir- 
tuosity, one realizes what accomplishment alone 
can do, for she is not yet twenty-five, and the art is 
already in the condition of genius with her. Five 
handsome side-wheels round the ring, and a flying 
jump on the horse, then several complete somersaults 
on the horse's back while he is in movement round 
the ring, is not to be slighted for consideration, and 
if, as I have said, you have a love or even a fancy 
for this sort of entertainment, you all but worship 
the little lady for the thrill she gives you through 
this consummate mastery of hers. 

177 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

"I always wanted to do what the boys could do, 
and I was never satisfied until I had accomplished 
it," This was the strongest assertion the little lady 
of the horse was moved to make while in conversa- 
tion, and that the ring is more beautiful to work in 
than on a mat upon a stage, for it is in the ring that 
the horse is most at home, it is easier for him, and 
gives him greater muscular freedom, with the result 
naturally, that it is easier on the muscles of the hu- 
man body while in action. I have never tired of 
this species of entertainment. It has always im- 
pressed me as being the most natural form of trans- 
posed physical culture, esthetically speaking. It 
does for the eye, if you are sensitive, what music 
does for the ear. It gives the body a chance to 
show its exquisite rhythmic beauty, as no other form 
of athletics can, for it is the beautiful plastic of the 
body, harmonically arranged for personal delight. 

It is something for so young a woman to have 
walked away with first honours in her chosen field, 
yet like the true artist that she is, she is thinking 
always of how she can beautify her accom.plishment 
to a still greater degree. She is mistress of a very 
diflicult art, and yet the brilliancy of her perform- 
ance makes it seem as if it were but the experiment 
of an afternoon, in the out-of-doors. Like all fine 
artists, she has brushed away from sight all aspects 
of labour, and presents you, w^ith astounding ease, 
the apparent easiness of the thing. She is power- 
fully built, and her muscles are master of coordina- 

178 



A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE 

tlon, such as would be the envy of multitudes of men, 
and with all this power, she is as simple in her man- 
ner and appearance as is the young debutante at her 
coming out function. You are impressed with her 
sweetness and refinement, first of all, and the utter 
lack of show about her, as also with her brother 
who is a dapper young m.an of the very English type, 
who works with her, and acts as the dress-suited 
gentleman in this acrobatic ringplay of theirs. 
Three other members of her family take part also 
with her, the ring-mistress, a woman of possibly 
forty, acting as host, looking exceptionally well, 
handsome indeed, in grey and silver evening dress, 
with fine dark eyes and an older sister who opens the 
performance with some good work. This seems to 
me to be the modern touch, for there was a time 
when it was always the very well groomed ringmas- 
ter, with top hat and monocle, who acted as host 
of the ring. 

It will likewise be remembered by those who saw 
the Hannafords at the circus, that they were also 
possessed of a very handsome ring-mistress, ele- 
gantly gowned, both of these older ladies lending 
great distinction, by their presence, to already bril- 
liant performances. I would be very pleased to 
make myself historian for these fine artists, these 
esthetes of muscular melody. I should like very 
much to be spokesman for them, and point out to 
an enforcedly ignorant public, the beauties of this 
line of artistic expression, and to give historical ac- 

179 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

count of the development of these various pictur- 
esque athletic arts. Alas, that is not possible, for it 
must remain forever in the limbo of tradition. 

We shall have to be grateful beyond expression 
for the beautiful art of May Wirth, and devote less 
enthusiasm to asking of when and how it came about. 
To have established one's art at the perfect point 
in one's girlhood, is it not achievement, is it not 
genius itself? Charming little May Wirth, first 
equestrienne of the world, I congratulate you for 
your beautiful presentation, for the excellence of its 
technique, and for the grace and fascination con- 
tained therein. Triumph in youth, victory in the 
heroic period of life, that surely is sufficient. Let 
the bays fall upon her young head gleefully, for she 
earned them with patience, devotion, intelligence, 
and very hard labours. Salutations, little lady of 
the white horse ! How charming, how simple she 
was, the little equestrienne as she rode away from 
the door of the huge theatre, in her pale blue tour- 
ing car. "I love the audiences here in this great 
theatre, but O, I love the circus so much more !" 
These were the sentiments of the little performer 
as she rode away. She Is now touring, performing 
under the huge canvases In the open areas of the 
middle West, and the little traveling circus Is on 
its way over the mountains. Fascinating people, 
and a fascinating life for whom there is not, and 
probably never will be, a written history; the story 
of whose origin lies almost as buried as that of the 

i8o 



A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE 

primitive peoples. Charming rovers, content with 
life near to the bright sky, charming people, for 
whom life is but one long day in which to make 
beautiful their bodies, and make joyful the eyes of 
those who love to look at them ! 



i8i 



JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON 

The vicissitudes of the young boy along the 
vague, precarious way, the longing to find the real- 
ity of the dream — the heart that knew him best — 
a study in sentimentality, the pathetic wanderings 
of a "little boy lost" in the dream of childhood, and 
the "little boy found" in the arms of his loved 
mother, with all those touches that are painful and 
all that are exquisite and poignant in their beauty 
— such is the picture presented by John Barrymore, 
as nearly perfect as any artist can be, in "Peter Ib- 
betson." Certainly it is as finished a creation in its 
sense of form, and of color, replete with a finesse 
of rare loveliness, as gratifying a performance, to 
my notion, as has been seen on our stage for many 
years. Perhaps if the author, recalling vain pasts, 
could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the 
play is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with 
great difficulty to survive the nesselrodelike sweet- 
ness with which it is surfeited, he would recognize 
the real distinction that Barrymore lends to a role 
so clogged by the honeyed sentimentality covering 
most of the scenes. Barrymore gives us that 
"quickened sense" of the life of the young man, a 
portrayal which takes the eye by "its fine edge of 

182 



JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON 

light," a portrayal clear and cool, elevated to a fine 
loftiness in his rendering. 

The actor has accomplished this by means of a 
nice knowledge of what symbolic expression means 
to the art of the stage. He is certainly a painter 
of pictures and moods, the idea and his image per- 
fectly commingled, endowing this mediocre play with 
true charm by the distinction he lends it, by sheer 
discretion, and by a power of selection. All this 
he brings to a play which, if it had been written 
nowadays, would certainly have convicted its author, 
and justly too, of having written to stimulate the 
lachrymal effusions of the shop-girl, a play about 
which she might telephone her girl friend, at which 
she might eat bon bons, and powder her nose again 
for the street. No artist, no accepted artist, has 
given a more suggestive rendering than has Barry- 
more here. It would be difficult to say where he is 
at his best, except that the first half of the play 
counts for most in point of strength and opportunity. 

A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with 
wonder and with awe at the perplexity of life, seek- 
ing a solution of things by means of the dream, as 
only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from 
first to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys 
think they want to be loved; that is, the shy longing 
boy, afraid of all things, and mostly of himself, in 
the period just this side of sex revelation. He is 
the neophyte — the homeless, pathetic Peter, per- 
plexed with the strangeness of things real and tern- 

183 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

poral — vision and memory counting for all there is 
of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet un- 
tasted. Who shall forget (who has a love for real 
expression) the entrance of Peter into the drawing- 
room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a 
boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent 
spices and herbs, and of actions so alien to his own? 
We are given at this moment the keynote of mastery 
in delicate suggestion, which never fails through- 
out the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side 
of symbolism and mystical insinuation. 

One sits with difficulty through many of the mo- 
ments, the literary quality of them is so wretched. 
They cloy the ear, and the mind that has been made 
sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of stim- 
ulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, 
a cold method — against a background of what could 
have been overheated acting or at least a super- 
abundance of physical attack — the warmth of the 
play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them 
with a still spiritual ardor which is their very es- 
sence, extracting all the delicate nuances and ar- 
ranging them with a fine sense of proportion. It 
is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one 
can imagine. For it is not given to many to act 
with this degree of whiteness, devoid of off color- 
ings or alien tones. This performance of Barry- 
more in its spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, 
and intelligence, has not been equaled for me since 

184 



JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON 

I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and Eleo- 
nora Duse. 

It is to be at once observed that here is a keen 
pictorial mind, a mind which visualizes perfectly 
for itself the chiaroscuro aspects of the emotion, 
as well as the spiritual,, for Barrymore gives them 
with an almost unerring felicity, and rounds out the 
portrayal which in any other hands would suffer, 
but Barrymore has the special power to feel the 
value of reticence in all good art, the need for com- 
plete subjection of personal enthusiasm to the force 
of ideas. His art is akin to the art of silver-point, 
which, as is known, is an art of directness of touch, 
and final in the instant of execution, leaving no room 
whatever for accident or untoward excitement of 
nerve. 

We shall wait long for the silver suggestiveness 
such as Barrymore gives us when Peter gets his first 
glimpse of Mary, Duchess of Towers. Who else 
could convey his realization of her beauty, and the 
quality of reminiscence that lingers about her, of 
the rapt amaze as he stands by the mantel-piece 
looking through the door into the space where he 
sees her in the midst of dancers under a crystal 
chandelier somewhere not very distant? Or the 
moment when he finds her bouquet neglected on the 
table in the drawing-room, with her lace shawl not 
far from his hands? Or when he finds himself 
alone, pressing his lips into the depth of the flowers 
as the curtain gives the finale to the scene with the 

185 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

whispered "ramour" ! These are moments of a 
real lyrist, and would match any line of Banville, 
of Ronsard, or of Austin Dobson for delicacy of 
touch and feeling, for freshness, and for the precise 
spiritual gesture, the "intonation" of action requi- 
site to relieve the moments from what might other- 
wise revert to commonplace sentimentality. 

Whatever the prejudice may be against all these 
emotions glace with sugary frosting, we feel that his 
art has brought them into being with an unmistak- 
able gift of refinement coupled with superb style. 
How an artist like Beardsley would have revelled in 
these moments is easy to conjecture. For here is 
the quintessence of intellectualized aquarelle, and 
these touches would surely have brought into being 
another "Pierrot of the Minute" — a new line draw- 
ing out of a period he knew and loved well. These 
touches would have been graced by the hand of that 
artist, or by another of equal delicacy of apprecia- 
tion, Charles Conder — unforgettable spaces replete 
with the essence of fancy, of dream, of those farther 
recesses of the imagination. 

Although technically and historically Barrymore 
has the advantage of excellent traditions, he never- 
theless rests entirely upon his own achievements, 
separate and individual in his understanding of what 
constitutes plastic power in art. He has a peculiar 
and most sensitive temper, which can arrange points 
of relation in juxtaposition with a keen sense of form 
as well as of substance. He is, one might say, a 

i86 



JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON 

masterly draftsman with a rich cool sense of color, 
whose work has something of the still force of a 
drawing of Ingres with, as well, the sensitive detail 
one finds in a Redon, like a beautiful drawing on 
stone. An excellent knowledge of dramatic con- 
trasts is displayed by the brothers Barrymore, John 
and Lionel, in the murder scene, one of the finest 
we have seen for many years, technically even, 
splendid, and direct, concise in movement. Every 
superfluous gesture has been eliminated. From the 
moment of Peter's locking the door upon his uncle 
the scene is wrapped in the very coils of catastrophe, 
almost Euripedean in its inevitability. All of this 
episode is kept strictly within the realm of the imag- 
ination. It is an episode of hatred, of which there 
is sure to be at least one in the life of every young 
sensitive, when every boy wants, at any rate some- 
where in his mind, to destroy some influence or other 
which is alien or hateful to him. The scene em- 
phasizes once again the beauty of technical power 
for its own sake, the thrill of discarding all that is 
not immediately essential to simple and direct real- 
ization. 

Little can be said of the play beyond this point, 
for it dwindles off into sentimental mystification 
which cannot be enjoyed by anyone under fifty, or 
appreciated by anyone under eighteen. It gives op- 
portunity merely for settings and some rare mo- 
ments of costuming, the lady with the battledore 
reminding one a deal of a good Manet. This and, 

187 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

of course, the splendid appearance of the Duchess 
of Towers in the first act — all these touches furnish 
more than a satisfying background for the very shy 
and frail Peter. 

This performance of Barrymore holds for me the 
first and last requisite of organized conception In art 
— poise, clarity, and perfect suggestibility. Its in- 
tellectual soundness rules the emotional extrava- 
gance, giving form to what — for lack of form — 
so often perishes under an excess of energy, which 
the ignorant actor substitutes for the plastic ele- 
ment In all art. It has the attitude, this perform- 
ance, almost of diffidence to one's subject-matter, 
except as the intellect judges clearly and coolly. 
Thus, in the sense of esthetic reality, are all aspects 
clarified and made real. From the outward Inward, 
or from the inward outward, surface to depth or 
depth to surface — it is difficult to say which is the 
precise method of approach. John Barrymore has 
mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes 
him one of our greatest artists. The future will 
surely wait for his riper contributions, and we may 
think of him as one of our foremost artists, among 
the few, "one of a small band," as the great novel- 
ist once said of the great poet. 



i88 



PART THREE 



LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS 

Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those re- 
markable evenings of conversation in the rue de 
Rome with Mallarme as host, and Henri de Regnier 
as guest, among many others, had been the inspira- 
tion of the evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where 
I so often sat of an evening, watching the numbers 
of esthetes gather, filling the entire cafe, rain or 
shine, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the 
air always, the feeling of suspense, of a dinner with- 
out host, of a wedding without bridegroom, in any 
event waiting for the real genius of the evening, le 
grand maitre prince de poetes, Paul Fort. The in- 
teresting book of Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," 
recalls these Tuesday evenings vividly to my mind, 
and a number of episodes in connection with the idea 
of poetry in Paris. 

Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion 
it would seem, and yet this was always so, it was a 
constituent of the day's passing, there was never a 
part of the day in this arrondissement, when you 
would not find here, there, everywhere, from the 
Boul-Mich up, down Montparnasse to Lavenue's, 
and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of 
many, obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes 
very nattily dressed, often the reverse, but you found 

191 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

them talking upon one theme, art, meaning either 
poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and 
doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symbol- 
iste period up to the "unanimistes" of the present 
time, or the then present time nearly two years be- 
fore the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensi- 
tive American, sitting there, realizing that it was 
all in the name of art, and for the heralding of 
genius — a kind of sublimated recruiting meeting for 
the enlistment in the army of expression of person- 
ality, or for the saving of the soul of poetry. 

It was a spectacle, edifying in its purport, or even 
a little distressing if one had no belief in a sense of 
humour, for there were moments of absurdity about 
it as there is sure to be in a room filled with any type 
of concerted egotism. But you did not forget the 
raison d'etre of it all, you did not forget that when 
the "prince" arrived there was the spirit of true 
celebration about it, the celebration not only of an 
arrived artist, but of an idea close to the hearts and 
minds of those present, and you had a sense, too, 
of what it must have been like in that circle of, no 
doubt, a higher average of adherents, in the draw- 
ing room of the genius Mallarme, who, from all 
accounts, was as perfected in the art of conversation, 
as he was in expression in art. When I read Miss 
Lowell's chapter on Henri de Regnier, I find myself 
before the door of the Mallarme house in the rue 
de Rome, probably the only American guest, on that 
Sunday morning in June, just one given a privilege 

192 



LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS 

that could not mean as much as if I had been more 
conversant with the delicacies of the language. 

It was the occasion of the placing of a tablet of 
homage to the great poet, at which ceremony Henri 
de Regnier himself was the chief speaker: a tall, 
very aristocratic, very elegant looking Frenchman, 
not any more to be called young, nor yet to be called 
old, but conspicuously simple, dignified, dressed in a 
manner of a gentleman of the first order, standing 
upon a chair, speaking, as one would imagine, with 
a flow of words which were the epitome of music 
itself to the ear. I had been invited by a poet well 
known in Paris, with several volumes to his credit 
and by a young literary woman, both of whom spoke 
English very creditably. After the ceremonies, 
which were very brief, and at which Madame 
Mallarme herself was present, standing near the 
speaker, de Regnier, the entire company repaired to 
a restaurant near the Place Clichy, if I remember 
rightly. My hostess named for me the various 
guests as they appeared, Madame Rachilde, Rey- 
naldo Hahn, Andre Gide, and a dozen other names 
less conspicuous, perhaps, excepting one, Leon 
Dierx, who was an old man, and whose death was 
announced about the city some days later. It was, 
needless to say, a conspicuous company and the din- 
ner went off very quietly, allowing of course for the 
always feverish sound of the conversation of many 
people talking in a not very large room. 

193 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

But all these suggestions recall for me once more 
what such things mean to a people like the French, 
or, let one say, Europeans as well. I wonder what 
poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to 
such a state in this country that we shall find our 
masters of literature holding audience with this de- 
gree of interest like Fort, or as did all the great 
masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the name 
of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable 
worship of poetry, or of things esthetic. I can 
imagine Amy Lowell doing something of this sort 
after the custom of those masters she so admires, 
with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all 
that is modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long 
for that, for the time when we shall have our best 
esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside under the 
trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of 
the evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic 
influence of such a one as Paul Fort or Francis 
Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren — as it was once to be 
had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that 
high company of distinguished painters who are now 
famous among us. 

The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always 
lively place in the rue de Fleurus, is the only room 
I have ever been in where this spirit was organized 
to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of 
the real importance of painting, as it used to be 
thought of in the Hays of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, 
and the others, and you had much, in all human ways, 

194 



LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS 

out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had 
a fund of good humour thrust at you, and the con- 
versation took on, not the quality of poetic prose 
spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and oth- 
ers, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as 
everyone knows, is style bringing the universe of 
ideas to your door in terms of your own sensations. 
There may have been a touch of all this at the once 
famed Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chili 
in its severity. 

There is something of charm in the French idea 
of taking their discussions to the sunlight or the 
shadow under the stars, either within or outside the 
cafe, where you feel the passing of the world, and 
the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the re- 
sult of stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library 
corners, where books crowd out the quality of peo- 
ple and things. You felt that the cafe was the place 
for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all 
of one fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as 
it was for the eye and the ear that absorbed it. De- 
spite the different phases of the spectacle of Tues- 
day, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of 
its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its 
reality, its relationship to every other phase of life, 
and not of the hypersensitivity of the thing as we 
still consider it among ourselves in general; and if 
you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis 
Jammes, it was a definite issue in daily life, equal 
with the name of the great statesmen in importance, 

195 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

you were being introduced into a sphere of activi- 
ties of the utmost importance, that poetry was some- 
thing to be reckoned with. 

It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists 
like Mallarme held forth with distinction, that 
artists like de Regnier and Fort devote themselves, 
however secretly, or however openly to the sacred 
theme. They had but one intention, and that to 
arrive at, and assist in the realization of the best 
state of poetry, that shall have carried the art fur- 
ther on its way logically, and in accordance with the 
principles which they have created for their time; 
endeavoring always to create fresh values, new 
points of contact with the prevailing as well as with 
the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a 
spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gath- 
ering of the poetic multitude around the cafe tables, 
over the Dubonnet, the grenadines, and the cafe 
noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense 
of perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite 
of the obstacles encountered in the run of the day, 
that the artist has the advantage over the layman 
in being qualified to set down, in shapes imperish- 
able, those states of his imagination which are the 
shapes of life and of nature. 

We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having 
assembled for our consummation, in a world where 
poetry is not as yet the sublime issue as it was to 
be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of 
the rue de Rome, the Cafe Novelles D'Athenes, and 

196 



LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS 

the Closerie de Lilas, as well as the once famed 
corner of the Cafe D'Harcourt where the absinthe 
flowed so continuously, and from which some very 
exquisite poetry has emanated for all time. It is 
the first intimation we have of what our best Eng- 
lish poetry has done for the best French poets of 
the present, and what our first free verse poet has 
done for the general liberation of emotions and for 
freedom of form in all countries. He has indicated 
the poets that are to follow him. He would be the 
first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity 
at the curbside, the liberty and freedom of the cafe, 
the excellence of a divine Tuesday evening. 



197 



EMILY DICKINSON 

If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful 
and playful mood, I take up the verses of that re- 
markable girl of the sixties and seventies, Emily 
Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless 
poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, 
at a time when the now classical New England group 
was flourishing around Concord, when Hawthorne 
was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was 
refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding 
lake bottoms and holding converse with all kinds 
of fish and other water life, and Emerson was stand- 
ing high upon his pedestal preaching of compensa- 
tions, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leav- 
ing a mighty impress upon his New England and the 
world at large as well. 

I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am 
sort of sunning myself in the discal radiance of a 
bright, vivid, and really new type of poet, for she 
is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she 
wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set 
in gold and dark enamels. She offsets the smug- 
ness of the time in which she lived with her cheery 
impertinence, and startles the present with her un- 
common gifts. Those who know the irresistible 

198 



EMILY DICKINSON 

charm of this girl — who gave so charming a por- 
trait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired 
for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but 
am small like the wren, and my hair is bold like the 
chestnut burr, and my eyes like the sherry in the 
glass that the guest leaves," this written in July, 
1862 — shall be of course familiar with the unde- 
niable originality of her personality, the grace and 
special beauty of her mind, charm unique in itself, 
not like any other genius then or now, or in the time 
before her, having perhaps a little of relationship 
to the crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan 
and Donne maybe, in respect of their lyrical fer- 
vour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless appear- 
ing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her 
verse creations as she herself was separated from 
the world around her by the amplitude of garden 
which was her universe. Emily Dickinson con- 
fronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be 
envied by the more ordinary and perhaps more fin- 
ished poets. Ordinary she never was, common she 
never could have been, for she was first and last 
aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you 
will, vague and mystical often enough, unapproach- 
able and often distinctly aloof, as undoubtedly she 
herself was in her personal life. Those with a 
fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, 
forbidding and difficult, if not altogether terrifying 
the mind with her vagueries and peculiarities. 

Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, 
199 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

wittiest, most fantastic, most wilful, most devout, 
saint and imp sported in one, toying with the tricks 
of the Deity, taking them now with extreme pro- 
fundity, then tossing them about like irresistible 
toys with an incomparable triviality. She has traced 
upon the page and with celestial indelibility that fine 
line from her soul which is like a fine prismatic light, 
separating one bright sphere from another, one 
planet from another planet, and the edge of separa- 
tion is but faintly perceptible. She has left us this 
bright folio of her "lightning and fragrance in one," 
sclntillant with Stardust as perhaps no other before 
her, certainly not in this country, none with just her 
celestial attachedness, or must we call it detached- 
ness, and withal also a sublime, impertinent play- 
fulness which makes her images dance before one 
like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zeal- 
ously with the universes at her feet, and just beyond 
her eye, with a loftiness of spirit and of exquisite 
trivialness seconded by none. Who has not read 
these flippant renderings, holding always some touch 
of austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more 
perfect "letters" to her friends, will, I think, have 
missed a new kind of poetic diversion, a new love- 
liness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every interval 
and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as 
it were like some sky child pranking with the clouds, 
and the hills and the valleys beneath them, child as 
she surely was always, playing in some celestial gar- 
den space in her mind, where every species of tether 

200 



EMILY DICKINSON 

was unendurable, where freedom for this childish 
sport was the one thing necessary to her ever young 
and incessantly capering mind — "hail to thee, bhthe 
spirit, bird thou ever wert" ! 

It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascina- 
tion was her element," everything to her was won- 
drous, sublimely magical, awsomely inspiring and 
thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have 
someone she liked say so much as good morning to 
her in human tongue, it was the event of every in- 
stant to have the flowers and birds call her by name, 
and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was 
the brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the 
gifted young daughter of the ancient imagination. 
One feels everywhere in her verse and in her so 
splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness, 
brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of 
a peculiarity that could have come only from this 
part of our country, this part of the world, this very 
spot which has bred so many intellectual and spir- 
itual entities wrapped in the garments of isolation, 
robed with questioning. Her genius is in this 
sense essentially local, as much the voice of the spirit 
of New England as it is possible for one to hold. 
If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, 
it was the poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode 
the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant and 
skybright mind of her. 

She loved all things because all things were in 
one way or in another way bright for her, and of a 

201 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

blinding brightness from which she often had to hide 
her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with 
starry intricacies, and gave them the splendour of 
frosty traceries upon the windowpane in a frigid 
time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and summered 
them with fragrancing of the many early and late 
flowers of her own fanciful conjuring. They are 
glittering garlands of her clear, cool fancies, these 
poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain 
finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of 
lights coursing swiftly through them. She was avid 
of starlight and of sunlight alike, and of that light 
by which all things are illumined with a splendour 
not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from 
that radiant sphere which she leaned from, looking 
out gleefully upon them from the window of that 
high place in her mind. 

To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for 
she lived in a radianced world of innumerable facets, 
and the common instances were chariots upon which 
to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is 
alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with 
no other wish in them save as memorandum for her 
own eyes, and when they were finished to send them 
spinning across the wide garden, many of them to 
her favorite sister who lived far, far away, over 
beyond the hedge. You shall find in her all that is 
winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic and irresistible 
in the eastern character and characteristic. She is 
first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the 

202 



EMILY DICKINSON 

eastern Is known as essentially a tragic genius. She 
is perhaps the single exponent of modern times of 
the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant 
was she then, and like dew she was and the soft 
summer rain, and the light upon the lips of flowers 
of which she loved to sing. Her mind and her spirit 
were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of 
Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful rela- 
tive of Francis Thompson. 

She had about her the Imperishable quality that 
hovers about all things young and strong and beau- 
tiful, she was the sense of beauty ungovernable. 
What there are of tendencies religious and moral 
disturb in nowise those who love and have apprecia- 
tion for true poetic essences. She had in her brain 
the Inevitable buzzing of the bee In the belly of the 
bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of 
the sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the 
Innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a 
quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was 
lover to the Immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats 
she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, 
she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of 
poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not 
a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sen- 
sibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to 
be in touch with all things with a name or with things 
that must be forever nameless. If she loved peo- 
ple, she loved them for what they were, if she de- 
spised them she despised them for what they did, 

203 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

or for lack of power to feel they could not do. Si- 
lence under a tree was a far more talkative experi- 
ence with her than converse with one or a thousand 
dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings 
were the multitude of flying movements in her brain. 
She had only to think and she was amid numberless 
minarets and golden domes, she had only to think 
and the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart. 

Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind 
accustomed to the labours of reading, she is too 
fanciful and delicious ever to make heavy the head, 
she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across 
your face for pity, and lets you loose again amid 
the measureless pleasing little humanities. I shall 
always want to read Emily Dickinson, for she points 
her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a 
chance with the universe about her and the first rate 
poetry it offers at every hand within the eye's easy 
glancing. She has made poetry memorable as a 
pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier minis- 
terial tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What 
a child she was, child impertinent, with a heavenly 
rippling in her brain! 

These random passages out of her writings will 
show at once the rarity of her tastes and the orig- 
inality of her phrasing. "February passed like a 
kate, and I know March. Here is the light the 
stranger said was not on sea or land — myself could 

arrest it, but will not chagrin him" 

204 



EMILY DICKINSON 

"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue 
terriers." 

"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed 
the house — still I feel the red in my mind though the drums 
are out." 

"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear 
today for the first the river in the tree." 

"The zeros taught us phosphorus 
We learned to like the fire 
By playing glaciers when a boy 
And tinder guessed by power 

Of opposite to balance odd 
If white a red must be! 
Paralysis, our primer dumb 
Unto vitality." 

Then comes the "crowning extravaganza. ... If 
I read a book, and It makes my whole body so cold 
no fire will ever warm me, I know that Is poetry. 
If I feel physically as If the top of my head were 
taken off, I know that Is poetry. Is there any other 
way? These are the only ways I know it." 

No one but a New England yankee mind could 
concoct such humours and fascinatingly pert phrases 
as are found here. They are like the chatterlngs 
of the Interrupted squirrel In the tree-hole at nut- 
time. There Is so much of high gossip In these 
poetic turns of hers, and so, throughout her books, 
one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the pleased 
mind to run with. She was an Intoxicated being, 
drunken with the little tipsy joys of the simplest 
form, shaped as they were to elude always her eva- 
sive Imagination into thinking that nothing she could 
think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. 

205 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

"Your letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted 
rum before — Domingo comes but once," etc., she 
wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely to 
offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give 
the unfamiliar reader a taste of the sparkle of this 
poet's hurrying fancy and set her before the willing 
mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will always 
delight those who find it in their way to love her 
elfish, evasive genius, and those who care for the 
vivid and living element in words will find her, to 
say the least, among the masters in her feeling for 
their strange shapes and the fresh significance con- 
tained in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in 
a great measure a gifted writer of it, refreshing 
many a heavy moment made dull with the weighti- 
ness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This 
poet-sprite sets scurrying all weariness of the brain, 
and they shall have an hour of sheer delight who 
invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She 
will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her 
rare and precious fancyings. She had that "oblique 
integrity" which she celebrates in one of her poems. 



206 



r 



/ 



ADELAIDE CRAPSEY 

One more satellite hurried away too soon ! High 
hints at least, of the young meteor finding its way 
through space. Here was another of those, with j 

a. vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest y-^ 

of hours in which to set them roaming. Brevities 
that whirl through the mind as you read those cin- 
quains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through 
the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or cas- 
tles, what is size? Is it not the same if they are of 
one perfection of feeling? Such a little book of 
Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, 
so clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in in- 
dications, so much of singing, so much of poetry, 
of courage. 

"Just now, 
Out of the strange 
Still dusk — as strange, as still, 
A white moth flew; Why am I grown 
So cold?" 

Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate po- 
etic gifts, sensibility of an exceptional order? Con- 
trast in so many ways with that perhaps more radi- 
ant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her rar- 
est of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, rid- 
ing to meet the Earl" ! I think geniuses like Keats 

207 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

or Shelley would have said "how do you do, poet?" 
to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also 
that she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk 
too soon, like the very moth over the garden wall, 
early in the evening. It is sure that had this poet 
been allowed her full quota of days, she would have 
left some handsome folios bright enough for any 
one caring for verse at its purest. Pity there was 
not time for another book at least, of her verses, to 
verify the great distinction conferred. She might 
have walked still more largely away with the 
wreaths of recognition. Not time for more books, 
instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She 
would surely have sent more words singing to their 
high places and have impressed the abundant out- 
put of the day with its superficiality by her serious- 
ness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of 
hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after 
giantesque composition. Fragile are they only in 
the sense of size, only in this way are they small. 
Those who know the difl'iculties of writing poetic 
composition are aware of the task involved in cre- 
ating such packed brevities. Emily Dickinson 
knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who 
understands the beauty of compactness. Superb 
sense of economy, of terseness the art calls for, ex- 
cessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these 
three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. 
There is little, after all, in existence that warrants 
lengthy dissertation. Life itself is epigrammatic and 

208 



ADELAIDE CRAPSEY 

brief enough. No volumes needed by way of ex- 
planation. The fascinating enigma diverts and per- 
plexes everyone alike. The simple understand it 
best, or at least they seem to do so. Segregation, 
aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another 
name for introspection, the looking out from bars 
of the caged house, all this discovers something 
through penetration. Walking with life is most nat- 
ural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little 
room for inquiry if one have the real feeling of 
life itself. Poetry is that which gleans most by 
keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides avail 
but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition 
do not enhance poetic values, they encumber them. 
Poetry is not declamation, it is not propaganda, it 
is breathing natural breaths. There is nothing me- 
chanical about poetry excepting the affectation of 
forms. Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. 
You count poetry by its essence, and no amount of 
studied effect, or bulging erudition will create that 
which is necessary, that which makes poetry what 
it is. The one essential is power to sing, and the 
intelligence to get it down with degrees of mastery 
or naturalness, which is one and the same thing. 

Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. 
Adelaide Crapsey shows that she was a real singer, 
essentially poet, excellent among those of our time. 
She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, 
in the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. 
She has so much of definiteness, so much of tech- 

209 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

nical beauty, economy, all very valuable assets for 
a true poet. She had never been touched with the 
mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too 
much for language to ride it. She cared too much 
for words to want to whip them into slavery. She 
was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, 
through crystal, at their freshness. She did not take 
them for granted. They were new to her and she 
wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon 
a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not 
run to the dictionary for eccentricities, she did not 
hunt words out of countenance. They were natural 
to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she 
succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these 
times. She raises herself above the many by her 
fine feeling for the precision. That is her artistry, 
the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever 
with her. 

It is to be regretted that Adelaide Crapsey had 
no more time for the miniature microscopic equa- 
tions, the little thing seen large, the large thing 
seen vividly. She might have spent more hours 
with them and less with her so persistent guest, this 
second self at her side; ironic presence, when she 
most would have strode with the brighter compan- 
ion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution 
is conspicuous among us for its balance and its in- 
tellectualism tempered with fine emotions. She had 
so much to settle for herself, so much bargaining 
for the little escapes in which to register herself con- 

2IO 



ADELAIDE CRAPSEY 

sistently, so much of consultation for her body's 
sake, that her mind flew the dark spaces about her 
bed with consistent feverishness. 

Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the 
painful, residual element of reflection. One must 
give, one must pay. It is not inspiring to beg for 
breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist, many 
a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability 
for living, with so little of the ability for dying. 
You cannot think along with clarity, with the doom 
of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every 
instant. There must be somehow apertures of 
peace for production. Adelaide Crapsey's chief 
visitant was doom. She saw the days vanishing, 
and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No 
wonder she could write brevities, she whose exist- 
ence was brevity itself. The very flicker of the 
lamp was among the last events. What, then, was 
the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intima- 
tion. If her work was chilled with severity, it was 
because she herself was covered with the cool 
branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, 
hence there is the ring of ice in these little pieces 
of hers. They are veiled with the grey of many 
a sunless morning. 



"These be 
Three silent things; 
The falling snow, — the hour 
Before the dawn, — the mouth of one 
Just dead," 

211 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Here you have the intensity once more of Ade- 
laide Crapsey. It haunts you like the something 
on the dark stairway as you pass, just as when, on 
the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing 
one's cheek would seem like the springing panther 
at one's throat. Dramatic vividness is certainly her 
chief distinction. No playfulness here, but a stout 
reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record 
the element at its best that played so fierce a role in 
her life. She writes her own death hymn, lays her 
own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if to 
give the engraver, who sets white words on white 
stone, the clue, stones the years stare on, leaving 
the sunlight to streak the old pathos there, and then 
settles herself to the long way of lying, to the sure 
sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down 
too soon on a world that held so much poetry for 
her. 

The titles of her cinquains, such as "November 
night", "The guarded wound", "The warning", 
"Fate defied", and the final touch of inevitability in 
"The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last 
moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey 
companion of the covering mists. It must be said 
hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was not all doom. 
By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book 
attest to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical won- 
ders of the hour. Her fervour is the artist's fervour, 
the longing, coming really to passion, to hold and 
fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to her. 

212 



ADELAIDE CRAPSEY 

That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, 
and his last distress. No one wants to give in to a 
commonplace world when the light that falls on it is 
lovelier than the place it falls on. If you cannot 
transpose the object, transport it, however simply, 
however ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is 
transport ! 

Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge 
of what poetry is, as she was certainly proficient as 
workman. She was lapidary more than painter or 
sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a 
sweeping aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to 
say, she wanted that. She wanted the white lighf^of 
the perfect gem, and she could not have been content 
with just matrix, with here and there embedded 
chips. She was a washer of gold, and spared no 
labours for the bright nuggets she might get, and the 
percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud 
hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was 
dimmed. 

"In the cold I will rise, I will bathe 
In the waters of ice; Myself 
Will shiver, and will shrive myself 
Alone in the dawn, and anoint 
Forehead and feet and hands; 
I will shutter the windows from light, 
I will place in their sockets the four 
Tall candles and set them a-flame 
In the grey of the dawn; And myself 
Will lay myself straight in my bed, 
And draw the sheet under my chin." 

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ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

There could be no more of resolute finality in 
this chill epilogue. There is the cold of a thousand 
years shuddering out of this scene, it is the passing, 
the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide 
Crapsey. If she has written more than her book 
prints, these must surely be of her best. She took 
the shape of that which she made so visible, so cold, 
so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted 
the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No 
whimpering here. Too much artistry for that; too 
much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts of Adelaide 
Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little 
of song is regrettable, even though she left us a 
legacy of some of the best singing of the day. It 
is enough to call her poet, for she was among the 
first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, 
no fashionable theories and ambitions. She sim- 
ply wrote excellent verse. That is her beautiful 
gift to us. 



214 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 

If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis 
Thompson. If ever a star ascended to that high 
place in the sky where sit the loftier planets in 
pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalk- 
ing through the shadows of the Thames Embank- 
ment to find his clear place in the milky way, is hardly 
the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It 
is but another instance of the odd tradition per- 
petuating itself, that some geniuses must creep hand 
and knee through mire, heart pierced with the 
bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways 
to that still place where skies are clear at last. 
Thompson is the last among the great ones to have 
known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, 
that can befall a human being. We have the silence 
of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much 
more than their few public words, tender but so care- 
ful. What they knew, and what the walls of the 
monastery of Storrington must have heard in that 
so pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repeti- 
tion for pathos. De Quincey had taught him much 
in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it is just 
similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in 
nature, is not easy to say. It was hardly the example 
to repeat. It is singular enough also, that De Quin- 

215 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

cey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a repeti- 
tion to Thompson, in just the same terms. 

London has no feeling for the peace of poets. 
They are the little things in the confused maelstrom 
of human endeavor. Poets are taught with the 
whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or 
so it was then. Sometimes it seems as if a change 
had come, for so many poets sit in chairs of ease 
these days. Science produces other kinds of dis- 
comfort, and covers the old misery with a new tap- 
estry of contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling 
matches these days, living on eleven pence a day. 
There is still the poet who knows his cheap lodging. 
There seems enough of them still for high minds to 
crawl into, and yet there is another face to the 
misery. 

Thompson was seraph from the first. You see 
the very doom burning out of his boy's eyes in the 
youthful portrait, and you see the logical end in that 
desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last 
period in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the 
severed head, and his feet were pathetically far 
away, down on a stony earth. That he should have 
forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent 
with his appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. 
That he should find himself on the long march past 
the stations of the cross, to the very tree itself, for 
his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with tradition, 
is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human 
experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think 

216 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 

of human, for he was too early in his career marked 
for martyr. There is the note of cricket-time in 
his earlier life, and how long this attached to the 
physical delights of his being cannot be told here. 
His eyes were lodged too far in heaven to have 
kept the delights for long, to have comprehended all 
that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet. 

"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the 
scrutiny that obsessed his ways, the impertinence 
that he suffered most; for he had the magnitude of 
soul that hungered for placement, and the plague 
of two masters was on him. Huntress and "Houn' ■ 
he had to choose between, beauty and the insatiable 
Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of 
them, too much craving altogether for an artistic 
nature. The earth had no room for him and he 
did not want heaven so soon. He was not saint, 
even though his name followed him even, for recog- 
nition. 

"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot 
his barbed minutes at me, suffered the trampling 
hoof of every hour," etc., all this confided to some 
childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else 
should he tell but a child? Where is the man or 
woman with understanding but has the "child" 
lodged somewhere for sympathy, for recognition? 
The clearest listener he could find, and the least 
commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, 
so divine for me", is but typical of a being so 
dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of the body, 

217 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at 
home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne 
to him, more than Kensall Green is to him now? 
What is such dust in his sky but some blinding and 
blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but 
sing until the throat cracks? Even the larks and 
the thrushes do that. They end their morning and 
evening with a song. He was brother to these birds 
in that loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while 
flesh fainted from hunger and weakness. 

Had not Storrington come to him in the dark 
places of London, we should have had no "Hound 
of Heaven", and without that masterpiece what 
would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his 
wounds with climbing music. That was his sense of 
beauty. He filled his hollowing cheek with finer 
things than moaning. He might have wept, but 
they were words instead of drops. 

It will be difiicult to find loftier song as to essences. 
We shall have room for criticising stylistic extrava- 
gances, archaisms of a not interesting order for us, 
yet there will be nothing said but the highest in 
praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped 
upon him without cessation, and it may end in the 
few cool yet incisive words that fell from the lips of 
Meredith, with the violets from another's wor- 
shipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." 
Poets of this time will have much to gather from 
Thompson in point of sincerity. There is terrific 

218 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 

mastery of words, which is like Shakespeare in fe- 
Hcity we do not encounter so often it seems to me. 

Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the 
night, and sits in radiant company among the first 
planetary strummers of song. His diamond is pure, 
and the matrix that hid him so long from showing 
his glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried 
down with death. They will soon be forgotten by 
the multitude as death itself made him forget them. 
We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs 
to remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a 
singer passed down our highroad. "Dusty with 
tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he 
is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. 
Shelley might have turned his own handsome phrase 
on him, for they both strode the morning of their 
bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same 
solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they 
are certainly of the one radiance, lyrical and poetical. 
Their consuming intellectual interests were vastly 
apart, as were their paths of spirit. 

I think we shall have no more "dread of height". 
Poetry has passed into scientific discovery. Intel- 
lectual passions are the vogue, earth is coming into 
its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. 
We are showing our humanities now, and the soul 
must wait a little, and remain speechless in some 
dull corner of the universe. Thompson was the last 
to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry 

219 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

has come to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are 
romantlcj and we are not romantic. The last Rhap- 
sodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense of 
lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis 
Thompson. 



220 



ERNEST DOWSON 

It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the 
eighteen-nineties nearly out of sight, and yet it is 
Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most of, 
from the last of this period. Poles apart these two 
poets are, the one so austere and almost collegiate 
in adherence to convention, the other too warm to 
let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't 
seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and 
yet you want to be saying a line of his every now 
and then, of him "that lived, and sang, and had a 
beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so 
soon. "Worn out by what was really never life to 
him," is a prefatorial phrase I recall. There was a 
genuine music in Dowson, even if it was smothered 
in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of 
saying things. "Come hither child, and rest — Be- 
hold the weary west," might have been the thing he 
was saying to himself, so much is this the essence 
of his lost cause. 

There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a 
hand toward the light, too much a trusting of the 
shadow. "I have flung roses, roses riotously with the 
throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind." 
Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like our- 

221 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

selves in these days, and yet Dowson was a poet. 
He caressed words until they sang for him the one 
plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed 
of the beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is 
seen in everything he did, or at least he imbibed this 
from Verlaine. He was himself a pale wanderer 
down soft green allees, he had a twilight mind 
struggling toward the sun, which was too bright for 
him, for the moon was his brightest light. Echoes 
of Verlaine linger through his verse and a strain 
of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French 
taste admired so much, two very typical idols for a 
young man with a sentimental journey to pursue. 
Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow 
that he cherished, for he petted his miseries consid- 
erably; or was it that he was most at home when 
he was unhappy? He would rather have seen the 
light of day from a not quite clear window, for in- 
stead of a clear hill, he might see a vague castle of 
his fancy somewhere. He hadn't the sweep of a 
great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet in 
him, there was the strain of the lute among the 
leaves, there was the rustle of a soft dress 
audible, and the passing of hands he could not 
ever hold. 

He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in 
Sentiment" is, I think, the title of a small book of 
prose of his. He might have called his poems 
"Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, 
how virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies 

222 



ERNEST DOWSON 

out of Rings", of his friend Theodore Peters, of the 
renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured velvet cloak 
embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so 
full of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this 
cloak. Cherry sounds red and passionate. But it 
was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom quite 
gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken 
warp. It reposes here in America, the property of 
an artist of that period. 

One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and 
a clear beauty which, if not exactly startling, was in 
its way truly genuine. It was merely too late for 
Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne 
had strummed the skies with every kind of song, 
and Verlaine had whispered every secret of the 
senses there was, in the land of illusion and vaguery. 
Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was 
sound first and last that he cared most for, the 
musical mastery of the one and the sentimentality 
of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type. 
He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was 
lost love, and he told it over and over in his book 
of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute was himself, 
and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his 
own insecurity and incapability. He perished for 
the love of hands. He is so like someone one knows, 
whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch in a 
friendly way, and say as little as possible. He 
comes to one humanly first, and asks you for your eye 
to his verse afterward, something of the "Little boy 

223 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak with sweetness 
and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility, 
or lack of power to be responsible. 

He was a helpless one, that is certain. He re- 
sorted to the old-fashioned methods of the decadents 
for maintaining the certain requisite melancholy ap- 
parently necessary to sing a certain way. In the 
struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a 
very clear, though a very sad singer. There were no 
lilies or orchids in his buttonhole, and no strange 
jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it was the 
time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave 
Moreau. He was plain and sincere, and pathetic, 
old-fashioned too in that he was bohemian, or at 
least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no Eng- 
lishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the 
docks had gotten him, and took away the sense of 
mastery over things that a real poet of power must 
somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His 
neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It 
was the age of absinthe and little taverns, for there 
was Verlaine and the inimitable Cafe d'Harcourt, 
which, as you saw it just before the war, had the 
very something that kept the Master at his drinks 
all day. 

Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing 
which has lasted so singularly until now, for there 
are still echoes of this in the air, even to the present 
day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried 
and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away 

224 



ERNEST DOWSON 

it all seems, and they were the substance of poetry 
then. Sounds were the Important things for Dow- 
son, which is essentially the Swinburne echo. Signifi- 
cant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, 
and the vine" of Poe. There was little else but 
singing in his verse however. His love of Horace 
did less for him than the masters of sound, excepting 
that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But 
it was all struggle for Dowson, a battle with the 
pale lily. It was for this he clung to cabmen's 
lounging places. He was looking for places to be 
out of the play in. He couldn't have survived for 
long, and yet there is a strain of genuine loveliness, 
the note of pure beauty in the verse of Dowson. He 
was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like 
tenacity. 

He helped close a period that was distinguished 
all over the world, the period of the sunflower. 
Apart from its wildest and most spectacular genius, 
it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious 
purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of 
sad and delicate young men. They all died in boy- 
hood really. These were, I think, with Dowson the 
best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for 
his power in verse, he with so much of the rose- 
tinted afterglow in him, so much of the old feeling 
for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes, 
and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a 
far finer source of delight for a much longer time, 
for therein is the best poetry he had to offer. 

225 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish 
whimperer in song. He was ineffectual, too much so, 
to take up the game of laughter for long. That 
would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to 
sit and weep tears of wordy rain. "II pleut dans 
mon coeur" was the famous touch of his master, it 
was the loudest strain in him. That was the lover- 
strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, 
imaginary love probably, and saw everywhere some- 
thing to remind him of what he had pathetically lost. 
If there had been a little savage in him, he would 
have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe 
did have a try or two, but they couldn't have en- 
dured, for he wasn't loving a particular Adelaide. 
That was the name he gave to love, for it was 
woman's lips, and eyes and hands that he cared most 
for, or at least seemed most to care. 

It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the 
dark and boisterous taverns where love finds strange 
ways for expression, that the singleness of feeling 
possessed him. It was among the rougher elements 
of dock life that his refinements found their level. 
Dowson sang and sang and sang, until he grew old 
at thirty-three, "worn out by what was never really 
life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his 
mother, the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of 
his old and vague fancies. There might he strum 
his heart out in the old way, and the world would 
never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of 
song. Perhaps in two hundred years, in other 

226 



ERNEST DOWSON 

"golden treasuries" there may appear the songs of 
Dowson as among the best of those early and late 
singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say 
now, for it cloys a little with sweets for us at this 
time, though it was then the time of honey and 
jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot 
of the glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, 
gold rain. That was the genius of poets like Dow- 
son, and pierrot was the master of them all. 



227 



HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE 

Henry James on Rupert Brooke ! Here is cer- 
tainly a very wide interval, separated, artist and sub- 
ject, by the greatest divergence of power, and one 
may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is 
surely, James, in all his elaborateness, trying to 
square the rose and compute the lily, algebraical ad- 
vances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke — a nature 
so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the 
sum had done to him, and for all that about him, or 
for those stellar ecstasies which held him bound with 
fervour as poet, planetary swimmer, and gifted as 
well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner of all 
the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge. 

For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration 
paramount in this preface to the Letters from Amer- 
ica, excess of byword, a strained relationship with 
his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian, 
and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, 
the tribute of the wise telling of beautiful and "blind- 
ing youth", surely more the treatise of the problemist 
forging his problem, as the sculptor might; some- 
thing too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too 
severe let one say, for its so gracing and brightening 
theme, something not springing into bloom, as does 

228 



HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE 

the person and personality of the young subject him- 
self. Only upon occasion does he really come upon 
the young man, actual, forgetful of all but him. 

There Is no question, if the word of those be true 
who had relation however slight or intimate with 
Brooke, that he was an engrossing theme, and for 
more than one greater than himself, as certainly he 
was for many much less significant than James. It 
is distinguished from the young poet's point of view 
that he was impressed, and that as person to person 
he really did see him in a convincing manner, as 
might one artist of great repute find himself un- 
commonly affected by the young and so living poet 
with more than a common gift for creation. It 
seems to me however that James is not over certain 
as to how poetic all things are in substance, yet all 
the while treating Brooke coolly and spaciously as 
an artist should. 

I did not know Brooke, and I know nothing of him 
beyond various photos showing him one way, quite 
manly and robust, and I feel sure he was so, and in 
another way as neither youth nor man, but some- 
thing idyllic, separate and seraph-like, untouched 
mostly with earthly experience. These pictures do 
show that he was, unquestionably, a bright gust of 
England, with an almost audible splendour about 
even these poor replicas, which make it seem that he 
did perform the ascribed miracle, that England really 
had brought forth of her brightest and best, only to 
lay away her golden fruitage in dust upon the bor- 

229 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

Gers of a far and classical sea, with an acute untimeli- 
ness. But respectfully let me say, I think much in 
these hours of the incongruity and pathos of ex- 
cessive celebration. There shall not be for long, 
singers enough to sing high songs commensurate with 
the delights of those numberless ones "who lived, 
and sang, and had a beating heart", those who have 
sped into the twilight too soon, having but a brief 
time to discover if years had bright secrets for them 
or clear perspective. There shall always lack the 
requisite word for them who have made many a dull 
morning splendid with faith, they who have been 
the human indication immeasurably of the sun's ris- 
ing, and of the truth that vision is a thing of reason. 
Of Brooke and the other dead poets as well, there 
has, it seems to me, been too much of celebration. 
But of Brooke and his poetry, which is a far superior 
product to these really most ordinary "Letters", 
there is in these poetic pieces too much of what I 
want to call "University Cleavage", an excess of old 
school painting, too much usage of the warm image, 
which, though emotional, is not sensuous enough to 
express the real poetic sensuousness, to make the line 
or the word burn passionately, too much of the 
shades of Swinburne still upon the horizon. Rose 
and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long 
been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. 
We have in this time come to like hardier colourings, 
which are for us more satisfying, and more poetic. 
We hardly dare use the hot words of "Anactoria" in 

230 



HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE 

our day. To be sure rose is English, for it has been 
for long a very predominant shade on the young face 
of England, but in Brooke there is an old age to the 
fervour, and in spite of the brilliant youth of the 
poet, there is an old age in the substance and really 
in the treatment as well. We are wanting a fresher 
intonation to those images, and expect a new ap- 
proach, and a newer aspect. It is not to adhere by 
means of criticism to the prevailing graveyard 
tendency, nor do we want so much of the easy and 
cheap journalistic element, as comes so often in the 
so named "free verse". What is really wanted is an 
individual consistency, and a brightness of imagery 
which shall be the poet's own by reason of his own 
personal attachment, and not simply the variance of 
the many-in-one poetry of the day. 

It is not enough to write passably, it is only enough 
when there are several, or even one, who will give 
their or his own peculiar contact with those agencies 
of the day, the hour, and the moment, who will find 
or invent a style best suited to themselves. Attempts 
at excessive individualism will never create true indi- 
vidualistic expression, no affected surprise in per- 
sonal perversity of image or metaphor will make a 
real poet, or real poetry. There must be first and 
last of all, a sure ardour, the poet's very own, which 
will of itself support obvious, or even slightly de- 
tectable, influences. It is not enough to declaim 
oneself, or propose continually one's group. The 
single utterance is what is necessary, a real fresh- 

231 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

ness of vocalization which is, so to speak, the singer's 
own throat. If he be original in his freshness, we 
shall be able to single him away from the sweeping 
movements of the hour by his very "specialness" in 
touch, that pressure of the mind and spirit upon the 
page, which is his. 

We shall translate a poet through his indications 
and intentions as well as through his arrivals, and 
we must condemn no one to fame beyond his capacity 
or deserts. We have never the need of extravagant 
laud. It is not enough to praise a poet for his per- 
sonal charm, his beauty of body and of mind and 
soul, for these are but beautiful things at home in a 
beautiful house. In the case of Brooke, we have 
ringing up among hosts of others, James's voice that 
he was all of this, but I would not wish to think it 
was the wish of any real poet to be "condemned to 
sociability", merely because he was an eminently 
social being, or because he was the exceptionally 
handsome, among the many less so ; or be condemned 
to overpraise for what is after all but an indication 
to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a 
very lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of 
what Brooke might have been, but it is not the 
reason to be doomed to find all things wonderful in 
him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always 
with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate the essence 
of beauty by a careful and very direct critical sense, 
which can and should, when honorably exercised, 
show up delicately, the sense of proportion. 

232 



HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE 

It is as much a part of the artist's equipment to 
find fault as it is to praise, for he wants by nature the 
true value with which he may relate himself to the 
sense of beauty. It seems, perhaps only to me, that 
in Brooke's poems there is but a vigorous mdication 
to poetic expression, whereas doubtless the man him- 
self was being excessively poetic, hour and moment 
together, and spent much energy of mind and body 
poetizing sensation. For me, there is a journalistic 
quality of phrasing and only very rarely the unusual 
image. As for the "Letters", they are loose and 
jotty in form, without distinction either in observa- 
tion or in form, without real felicity or uniqueness. 
Art is nothing if it is not the object, or the idea, or 
experience seen in review, with clarity. In Brooke, 
I feel the super-abundance of joy in the attractive- 
ness of the world, but I do not feel the language of 
him commensurate or distinguished in the qualities 
of poetic or literary art. There seems to me to be 
too much of the blown lock and the v/istful glance, 
too much of the attitudinized poet, lacking, I may 
even say, in true refinement, often. 

A too comfortable poet, and poetry of too much 
verve without incision, too much "gesturing", which 
is an easy thing for many talented people, and there 
is also missing for me the real grip of amazement. 
You will not find anything in the letters that could 
not have been done by the cub reporter, save possibly 
in the more charming of the letters with reference to 
swimming in the South Seas. Here you feel Brooke 

233 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

at home instantly, and the picturing is natural and 
easy. But other than this, you will find no phrasing 
to compare with passages of James's preface, such, 
for instance, as the "sky-clamour of more dollars", 
surely a vastly more incisive phrase regarding the 
frenzies of New York, than all that Brooke essays 
to tell of it. Brooke is distinctly "not there" too 
often in these so irregular letters of his. Letters 
are notably rare in these times anyhow, and so it 
is with the letters of Brooke. We look for dis- 
tinction, and it is not to be found, they have but 
little of the intimacy with their subjects that one 
expects. 

As to his poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly 
approaching state approval, there is in it the flavour 
of the budding laureate, it seems to me to be poetry 
already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger 
of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets 
who perished in the throes of heroism. Like them, 
he would, had he lived, have had to save himself 
from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. 
He would have had to overcome his tendency toward 
what I want to call the old-fashioned "gold and 
velvet" of his words, a very definite haze hanging 
over them of the ill effect of the eighteen-ninety 
school, which produced a little excellent poetry and 
a lot of very tame production. Poetry is like all 
art, difficult even in its freest interval. Brooke must 
rest his claim to early distinction perhaps upon the 
"If I should die" sonnet alone, he would certainly 

234 



HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE 

have had to come up considerably, to have held the 
place his too numerous personal admirers were wont 
to thrust upon him. Unless one be the veritable 
genius, sudden laurels wither on the stem with too 
much of morning. 

This poet had no chance to prove what poetry of 
his would have endured the long day, and most of 
all he needed to be removed from too much love of 
everything. The best art cannot endure such pro- 
miscuity, not an art of specific individual worth. In 
the book which is called "Letters from America", 
the attraction lies in its preface, despite the so notice- 
able irrelevancy of style. It seems to me that James 
might for once have condescended to an equal foot- 
ing with his theme, for the sake of the devoutness of 
his Intention, and have come to us for the moment, 
the man talking of the youth. He might then have 
told us something really intimate of "Rupert", as he 
so frequently names him, for this would indicate 
some intimacy surely, unless perchance he was 
"Rupert" to the Innumerables whom he met, and 
who were sure of his intimacy on the instant's intro- 
duction, which would indeed be "condemned to socia- 
bility". 

This book Is In two pieces, preface and content, 
and we are conscious chiefly of the high style and 
interest of the preface, first of all, and the discrep- 
ancy inherent In the rest of the book accentuating the 
wide divergence between pralser and praised. It is 
James with reference to Brooke, it is not Henry 

235 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

James informing of the young and handsome Rupert 
Brooke. Apollo in the flesh must do some mighty 
singing. Brooke had not done much of this when 
they laid him by on the borders of that farther sea. 
He had more to prove the heritage laid so heavily 
upon him by the unending host of his admirers and 
lovers. He needed relief from the popular notion, 
and we must relieve ourselves from his excessive 
popularity if we are to enjoy him rightly, by being 
just with him. A little time, and we should have 
learned his real distinction. It is too soon for us, 
and too late for him. We must accept him more for 
his finer indications then, and less for his achieve- 
ment in the sense of mastery. 



236 



THE DEARTH OF CRITICS 

There is just cause for wonder at the noticeable 
absence of critics in the field of painting, of indi- 
viduals who are capable of some serious approach to 
the current tendencies in art. We have witnessed a 
very general failure to rise above the common or 
high-class reportorial level in this particular sphere. 
Why do so many people who write specifically about 
painting say so little that really relates to it? It is 
because most of them are journalists or men of let- 
ters who have made emotional excursions into this 
field, which is in most instances foreign to them; 
well-known literary artists, occasionally, intent upon 
varying their subject matter. 

We read Meier-Graefe, for instance, on the de- 
velopment of modern art, and we find his analogies 
more or less stimulating, but taken as a whole his 
work is unsatisfactory from an artist's point of view; 
not much more than a sort of novel with art for its 
skeleton, or rather a handbook from which the un- 
tutored layman can gather superficial information 
about group and individual influences, a kind of 
verbal entertainment that is altogether wanting in 
true critical values. I have listened to lectures on 

237 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

art by people who were supposed to know about it, 
merely to see how much this type of critical study 
could satisfy the really artistic mind somewhat con- 
versant with true relations, and I have found these 
lectures of but the slightest value, resumes com- 
pounded of wearisome and inappropriate detail. 
There is always an extreme lack of true definition, of 
true information, there is always too much of the 
amateur spirit passing for popular knowledge among 
these individuals who might otherwise do so much 
to form public taste and appreciation. Thus we find 
that even the chatty Meier-Graefe stops without 
going any further than Cezanne. It is possible that 
after writing two very heavy volumes upon the de- 
velopment of modern art, he has to remain silent on 
modern art itself, that he really feels he is not quali- 
fied to speak upon Cezanne and his successors; or 
does he assume possibly that there is nothing this 
side of Cezanne? How many writer people are 
there who really do understand what has taken place 
since then? 

I have heard these characteristic remarks among 
the so-called art writers who write the regular 
notices for the daily journals — "You see I really 
don't know anything about the subject, but I have to 
write I" or — "I don't know anything about art, but I 
am reading up on it as much as possible so that I 
won't appear too stupid; for they send me out and I 
have to write something." Their attitude is the 
same as if their subject were a fire or a murder: but 

238 



THE DEARTH OF CRITICS 

being very much at variance in theory, but both full 
of discernment whatever one may think of their in- 
dividual ideas. We are sure of both as being thor- 
oughly inside the subject, this theme of modern art, 
for they are somehow painter people. I even sus- 
pect them both of having once, like George Moore, 
painted seriously themselves. 

Nevertheless there is a hopeful seriousness of in- 
terest developing in what is being done this side the 
sea, a rediscovery of native art of the sort that is 
occurring in all countries. The artist is being taught 
by means of war that there is no longer a conven- 
tional center of art, that the time-worn fetish of 
Paris as a necessity in his development has been dis- 
pensed with; and this is fortunate for the artist and 
for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect 
upon the creative powers of the individual in all 
countries, almost obliging him to create his own im- 
pulse upon his own soil; it is making the artist see 
that if he is really to create he must create irre- 
spective of all that exists as convention in the mind. 

How will this affect the artist? He will learn 
first of all to be concerned with himself, and what he 
puts forth of personality and of personal research 
will receive its character from his strict adherence 
to this principle, whether he proceeds by means of 
prevailing theories or by departure from them. The 
public will thus have no choice but to rely upon what 
he produces seriously as coming clearly from him- 
self, from his own desire and labor. He will realize 

241 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

that it is not a trick, not a habit, not a trade — this 
modernity — and that with fashions it has nothing to 
do; that it is explicitly a part of our modern urge 
toward expression quite as much as the art of Corot 
and Millet were of Barbizon, as the art of Titian, 
Giorgione and Michelangelo were of Italy; that 
he and his time bear the strictest relationship to one 
another and that through this relationship he can 
best build up his own original power. Unable to de- 
pend therefore upon the confessedly untutored lay 
writer or even the better class essayist to tell him 
his place, he will establish himself, and his place will 
be determined in the regime of his day by precisely 
those qualities which he contributes to it. He will 
not rely too insistently upon idiosyncrasy; the failure 
of this we have already seen, in the post-impres- 
sionists. 

The truth is that painters must sooner or later 
learn to express themselves in terms of pure 
language, they must learn that creation is the thing 
most expected of them, and, if possible, invention as 
well. Oddity in execution or idea is of the least 
importance. Artists have a more respectable service 
to perform than this dilettantist notion of beauty im- 
plies. Since the utter annihilation of sentimentality, 
of legend, of what we call poetry has taken place, a 
richer substance for expression has come to us by 
means of which the artist may express a larger, 
newer variety of matter, more relevant to our special 
need, our modernity. 

242 



THE DEARTH OF CRITICS 

The war disintegrated the art habit and in this 
fact lies the hope of art. Fads have lost what slight 
interest they possessed, the folly of imitation has 
been exposed. As a result of this, I like to think 
that we shall have a finer type of expression, a richer 
kind of personal quality. Every artist is his own 
maker, his own liberator; he it is that should be the 
first to criticise, destroy and reconstruct himself, he 
should find no mood convenient, no attitude com- 
fortable. What the lay-writer says of him in praise 
or blame will not matter so much in the future; he 
will respect first and last only those who have found 
the time to share his theme, at least in mind, if not 
in experience, and the discerning public will free 
itself from the temporary influences of the con- 
fessedly untutored critic. The artist will gain its 
confidence by reason of his own sincerity and intelli- 
gence. It is probable, too, that in time criticism in 
the mode of Ruskin will utterly disappear and the 
Meier-Graefe type of critic will have found a fitter 
and true successor, someone who, when he calls him- 
self a critic, will prove a fairly clear title to the 
distinction and will not have to apologize for himself 
or for his occupation. 



243 



AFTERWORD 



THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA" 

We are indebted to Tristan Tzara and his fol- 
lowers for the newest and perhaps the most im- 
portant doctrinary insistence as applied to art which 
has appeared in a long time. Dada-ism is the latest 
phase of modernism in painting as well as in litera- 
ture, and carries with it all the passion for freedom 
of expression which Marinetti sponsored so loudly 
in his futuristic manifestoes. It adds likewise an ex- 
hilarating quality of nihilism, imbibed, as is said, di- 
rectly from the author of Zarathustra. Reading a 
fragment of the documentary statement of Dada- 
ism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly 
in the fact that they wish all things levelled in the 
mind of man to the degree of commonplaceness 
which is typical of and peculiar to it. 

Nothing is greater than anything else, is what the 
Dada believes, and this is the first sign of hope the 
artist at least can discover in the meaningless im- 
portance which has been invested in the term ART. 
It shows best of all that art is to betake itself on its 
own way blandly, despite the wish of its so ardent 
supporters and suppressors. I am greatly relieved 
as artist, to find there is at least one tenet I can hold 
to in my experience as a useful or a useless human 
being. I have always said for myself, I have no 

247 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

office, no obligations, no other "mission", dread- 
fullest of all words, than to find out the quality of 
humor that exists in experience, or life as we think 
we are entitled to call it. I have always felt the 
underlying fatality of habit in appreciation, because 
I have felt, and now actually more than ever in my 
existence, the fatality of habit indulged in by the 
artist. The artist has made a kind of subtle crime of 
his habitual expression, his emotional monotonies, 
and his intellectual inabilities. 

If I announce on this bright morning that I am a 
"Dada-ist" it is not because I find the slightest need 
for, or importance in, a doctrine of any sort, it is 
only for convenience of myself and a few others that 
I take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is 
one who expresses himself at all times in any way 
that is necessary and peculiar to him. A dada-ist is 
one who finds no one thing more important than any 
other one thing, and so I turn from my place in the 
scheme from expressionist to dada-ist with the easy 
grace that becomes any self-respecting humorist. 

Having fussed with average intelligence as well as 
with average stupidity over the various dogmatic as- 
pects of human experience such as art, religion, phil- 
osophy, ethics, morals, with a kind of obligatory 
blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my 
vision, which is nothing more or less than the 
superbly enlightening discovery that life as we know 
it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be treated 
other than with the spirit of comedy in compre- 

248 



THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA" 

hension. It is cause for riotous and healthy laughter, 
and to laugh at oneself in conjunction with the rest 
of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries, concern- 
ing the things one cannot name or touch or compre- 
hend, is the best anodyne I can conjure in my mind 
for the irrelevant pains we take to impress ourselves 
and the world with the importance of anything more 
than the brilliant excitation of the moment. It is 
thrilling, therefore, to realize there is a healthy way 
out of all this dilemma of habit for the artist. One 
of these ways is to reduce the size of the "A" in art, 
to meet the size of the rest of the letters in one's 
speech. Another way is to deliver art from the 
clutches of its worshippers, and by worshippers I 
mean the idolaters and the commercialists of art. 
By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence for 
art is beyond their knowledge of it. By the com- 
mercialists I mean those who prey upon the igno- 
rance of the unsophisticated, with pictures created by 
the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through the 
banality of, "artistic" temperament. Art is at pres- 
ent a species of vice in America, and it sorely and 
conspicuously needs prohibition or interference. 

It is, I think, high time that those who have the 
artistic habit toward art should be apprised of the 
danger they are in in assuming of course that they 
hold vital interest in the development of intelligence. 
It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in 
matters of taste and judgment. We learn little or 
nothing from habit excepting repetitive imitation. I 

249 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

should, for the benefit of you as reader, interpose 
here a little information from the mind of Francis 
Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among 
the cubists, upon the subject of dada-ism. 

"Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing. 
It is like your hopes: nothing. 
Like your paradise: nothing. 
Like your idols: nothing. 
Like your politicians: nothing. 
Like your heroes: nothing. 
Like your artists: nothing. 
Like your religions: nothing." 

A litany like this coming from one of the most 
notable dada-ists of the day, is too edifying for 
proper expression. It is like a window opened upon 
a wide cool place where all parts of one's exhausted 
being may receive the kind of air that is imperative 
to it. For the present, we may say, a special part 
of one's being which needs the most and the freshest 
air is that chamber in the brain where art takes 
hold and flourishes like a bed of fungus in the dark. 

What is the use, then, of knowing anything about 
art until we know precisely what it is? If it is such 
an orchidaceous rarity as the world of worshippers 
would have us believe, then we know it must be 
the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon 
the health of other functions and sensibilities in 
ourselves. The question comes why worship what 
we are not familiar with? The war has taught us 
that idolatry is a past virtue and can have no 

250 



THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA" 

further place with intelligent people living in the 
present era, which is for us the only era worth con- 
sideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore — to ride 
away with, out into the world of intricate common 
experience; out into the arena with those who know 
what the element of life itself is, and that I have 
become an expression of the one issue in the mind 
worth the consideration of the artist, namely fluidic 
change. How can anything to which I am not re- 
lated, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am 
only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to 
scientific principle in experience. What yesterday 
can mean is only what yesterday was, and tomorrow 
is something I cannot fathom until it occurs. I ride 
my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art 
which is with us a modern vice at present, into the 
wide expanse of magnanimous diversion from which 
I may extract all the joyousness I am capable of, 
from the patterns I encounter. 

The same disgust which was manifested and 
certainly enjoyed by Duse, when she demanded that 
the stage be cleared of actors in order to save the 
creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that 
makes us yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract 
movements in order that we may release art from 
its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art 
its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging 
diversion, pastime, even dissipation if you will; for 
all real expression is a phase of dissipation in itself: 
To release art from the disease of little theatre-ism, 

251 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

and from the mandibles of the octopus-like wor- 
shipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious 
estheticism within range, disgorging it without in- 
telligence or comprehension upon the consciousness 
of the not at all stupid public, with a so obviously 
pernicious effect. 

"Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, 
analogous to that of the scientist with his eyeglass 
glued to the microscope." Dada is irritated by those 
who write "Art, Beauty, Truth", with capital letters, 
and who make of them entities superior to man. 
"Dada scoffs at capital letters, atrociously." "Dada 
ruining the authority of constraints, tends to set free 
the natural play of our activities." "Dada therefore 
leads to amoralism and to the most spontaneous and 
consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism 
is expressed in a thousand ways of life." "Dada 
scrapes from us the thick layers of filth deposited 
on us by the last few centuries." "Dada destroys, 
and stops at that. Let Dada help us to make a com- 
plete clearance, then each of us rebuild a modern 
house with central heating, and everything to the 
drain, Dadas of 1920." 

Remembering always that Dada means hobby- 
horse, you have at last the invitation to make merry 
for once in our new and unprecedented experience 
over the subject of ART with its now reduced front 
letter. It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer 
of art in that it offers at last a release for the ex- 
pression of natural sensibilities. We can ride away 

252 



i?0 8. 9:-f 



THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA" 

to the radiant region of "Joie de Vivre", and find 
that life and art are one and the same thing, re- 
sembling each other so closely in reality, that it is 
never a question of whether it shall or must be set 
down on paper or canvas, or given any greater de- 
gree of expression than we give to a morning walk 
or a pleasant bath, or an ordinary rest in the sunlight. 
Art is then a matter of how one is to take life 
now, and not by any means a matter of how the 
Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race has shown 
it to be for their own needs and satisfaction. If 
art was necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us 
now, therefore it is free to express itself as it will. 
You will find, therefore, that if you are aware of 
yourself, you will be your own perfect dada-ist, in 
that you are for the first time riding your own hobby- 
horse into infinity of sensation through experience, 
and that you are one more satisfactory vaudevillian 
among the multitudes of dancing legs and flying wits. 
You will learn after all that the bugaboo called 
LIFE is a matter of the tightrope and that the stars 
will shine their frisky approval as you glide, if you 
glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun in the per- 
formance. That is what art is to be, must come to 
in the consciousness of the artist most of all, he is 
perhaps the greatest offender in matters of judgment 
and taste ; and the next greatest offender is the 
dreadful go-between or "middleman" esthete who 
so glibly contributes effete values to our present day 
conceptions. 



ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS 

We must all learn what art really is, learn to re- 
lieve it from the surrounding stupidities and from 
the passionate and useless admiration of the horde 
of false idolaters, as well as the money changers in 
the temple of success. Dada-ism offers the first 
joyous dogma I have encountered which has been 
invented for the release and true freedom of art. It 
is therefore most welcome since it will put out of 
use all heavy hands and light fingers in the business 
of art and set them to playing a more honourable 
and sportsmanlike game. We shall learn through 
dada-ism that art is a witty and entertaining pastime, 
and not to be accepted as our ever present and stulti- 
fying affliction. 



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